A Journey Through the Carpet Traditions of the Caucasus, Anatolia, and Zagros

If you’ve ever stepped barefoot onto a handmade carpet, you know the feeling: the texture is alive, the colors shimmer differently as you move, and somehow the floor beneath you feels less like wood or stone and more like earth itself. In the Caucasus and its neighboring lands, carpets have always been more than fabric. They are prayer mats, dowries, protection from the evil eye, chronicles of belief, and companions in death.

This story begins not in a museum but in the homes of shepherds, merchants, and mothers, where the loom stood at the center of daily life. Join me as we wander through Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Kurdistan region of Iraq, tracing the patterns that connect and distinguish them, listening to the songs of weavers, and discovering why carpets remain some of the most powerful storytellers of the Orient.

Georgia — Pardagi and Khalicha: Voices of the Mountains

In a stone house in Tusheti, high above the Alazani Valley, a loom leans against a wall blackened by centuries of smoke. A woman, her fingers nimble from years of spinning wool, works on what she calls a pardagi. The design is simple at first glance: zigzags, diamonds, stark contrasts of red, black, and undyed white. But look closely and you see mountains, ram’s horns, protective symbols — the essence of highland life woven into geometry.

Experience the traditional Tushetian Pardagi during our extended Georgian tour to the Tusheti region

Pardagi, the flat-woven kilims of Georgia, were never meant to be luxurious. They were made to be carried, folded, and spread quickly in tents or wooden houses. They warmed shepherds on lonely nights. Yet in their sharp motifs, they also carried prayers — against wolves, against cold, against the fragility of human life in the Caucasus peaks.

Further south, in Kakheti or Kvemo Kartli, you’ll find khalicha — pile carpets with denser knots, richer colors, and more elaborate medallions. Here, the hues expand: madder reds, indigo blues, golden yellows from mountain flowers. These carpets were not only underfoot but often hung on walls like protective icons.

Today, when young weavers in Tbilisi or Telavi revive these traditions, they speak of reconnecting with ancestors. “Every knot is like a heartbeat,” one weaver told me. Georgia’s carpets are not just art; they are mountain memory given form.

Armenia — Dragons, Crosses, and Sacred Floors

Step into an old Armenian church and you might notice something curious: beneath the carved khachkars, beside the flickering candles, there may lie a carpet, faded but dignified. Armenians did not see carpets as ordinary textiles — they saw them as vessels of sacred energy.

During our Yerevan city tour, we’ll have free time to visit the 'Vordan Karmir' Armenian Carpet Museum

The oldest Armenian rugs are named after creatures both real and mythic: vishapagorg (“dragon rugs”), artsavagorg (“eagle rugs”). A dragon may stretch its coiled body across the field, locked in eternal struggle with a phoenix. In the center, a stylized tree of life rises, flanked by guardian animals. These were not mere decorations but cosmologies rendered in wool.

Christian symbolism, too, wove itself into patterns: crosses, eight-pointed stars, and sunbursts echoing the designs of Armenia’s stone khachkars. A rug placed before an altar became an extension of holy ground. Generations of knees pressed into its pile, whispering prayers into its threads.

The colors of Armenian carpets are legendary. The crimson of vordan karmir (Porphyrophora hamelii), the cochineal insect found in the Ararat valley, was so prized that medieval merchants carried it along the Silk Road as though it were rubies. Combined with indigo blues, walnut browns, and madder reds, Armenian rugs glowed with an inner fire.

In Armenian families, weaving a carpet was often part of a girl’s dowry. To weave was to prepare for life itself. “A carpet holds the patience of a bride,” one proverb says. In every dragon, cross, and vine motif, you feel not just artistry but devotion.

Azerbaijan — A Thousand Schools

If Armenia spiritualized weaving, Azerbaijan made it into a national epic. Here, the craft is so central that UNESCO recognized Azerbaijani carpet weaving as world heritage.

Travel across Azerbaijan, and each region greets you with its own dialect of design. In Karabakh, carpets blaze with exuberant colors and fields of floral motifs. In Guba-Shirvan, restraint dominates: sharp-edged geometry, medallions repeating with rhythmic precision. Ganja-Gazakh rugs are bold, with oversized central figures, while Tabriz (named after the main city in Azerbaijan region of Iran), produces carpets of near-Persian refinement.

A Karabakh-style Azerbaijani carpet featuring multiple buta ornaments.

One motif unites them all: the buta, a flame-shaped almond form. To some, it is fire — recalling Zoroastrian roots. To others, it is a seed, fertility itself. A Karabakh carpet, seeded with dozens of buta motifs, looks like a field of flames dancing in unison.

Weaving in Azerbaijan was not just women’s work; it was a family and seasonal enterprise. Wool was shorn in spring, dyes boiled in summer, weaving stretched through winter evenings. When the carpet was finally cut from the loom, families often held a celebration — the textile was treated like a newborn child.

These carpets did not stay in villages. They traveled — across caravan routes, into palaces and mosques, onto European collectors’ walls. Yet their heart remained the same: born of communal rhythm, dyed with mountain herbs, patterned with dreams.

Turkey — Anatolia’s Knots of Nomad and Court

Imagine a tent pitched on the Anatolian steppe. Inside, the floor is covered not with bare earth but with a kilim, bright diamonds and stylized hands-on-hips figures glowing against the firelight. A Turkish nomad’s first home was not wood or stone — it was wool.

Anatolia gave the world the symmetrical knot, also called the Turkish or Ghiordes knot. This technique created a dense, strong pile, perfect for rugs that would be rolled, packed, moved, and unrolled again on endless migrations.

But Anatolia is not only nomad. In the Ottoman courts, the same knots blossomed into grand rugs spread across the halls of Topkapi Palace. There, the motifs grew more floral, influenced by Persian arabesques and Islamic geometry.

Turkish kilims, especially, tell intimate stories. The hands-on-hips figure symbolizes femininity and fertility. Eye-motifs guard against the evil eye. Stylized rams’ horns mark strength. These are not abstract designs — they are woven prayers for healthy children, good harvests, safe journeys.

In dyes, Anatolia relied on madder for red, indigo for blue, onion skins and chamomile for yellows, walnut husks for brown. Each village had its recipes, so a practiced collector could often guess the origin of a carpet by the shade of its red alone.

What sets Turkish carpets apart is their dual nature: the same technique binding nomadic kilims together also produced monumental court carpets. They belong as much to tents on the steppe as to gilded palaces.

Iraqi Kurdistan — Mountain Wool, Tribal Codes

Kurdish carpets are less about refinement and more about raw power. In the mountain villages of Iraqi Kurdistan, a loom might stand outdoors, propped against stone walls, women knotting thick wool while children play nearby.

These carpets are heavy, often coarser than Persian or Anatolian ones, but their geometry is bold: serrated diamonds, stepped medallions, hooked leaf patterns. The colors are earthy — deep indigo, chestnut brown, fiery orange. They feel grounded, elemental, like the mountains themselves.

Among Kurds, weaving was bound to life passages. A bride’s dowry was incomplete without kilims. To weave was to prove not just skill but endurance. Many carpets carried tribal identity — colors and motifs that marked belonging. To recognize a pattern was to recognize kin.

The dyes were simple yet rich: madder root for red, chamomile for yellow, indigo for blue, walnut for brown. The variations of shade gave Kurdish carpets a rugged beauty, full of contrasts.

Compared to refined Tabriz or Istanbul rugs, Kurdish ones might seem “rough.” But in that roughness lies strength. They are carpets of migration and survival, as ready for a tent floor as for a burial. They declare: “We endure.”

The Alchemy of Color

The true magic of these carpets lies in color. Every shade was coaxed from the earth:

• Madder root produced reds ranging from orange to deep crimson.

• Indigo yielded a blue that seemed eternal, resisting time.

• Walnut husks made browns and blacks.

• Onion skins, chamomile, saffron substitutes gave yellows.

• Pomegranate rind offered greenish browns.

• Cochineal insects, especially the Armenian vordan karmir, gave reds so luminous they seemed lit from within.

Natural dyes age like wine. Instead of fading flat, they soften into luminous tones. Collectors call this abrash — the gentle, uneven shifts of shade across a field, like sunlight falling across a landscape. A carpet ages, but it does not die; it glows.

The Grammar of Motifs

To read a carpet is to read a language:

• Tree of life: the promise of continuity and immortality.

• Ram’s horns: fertility and masculine strength.

• Stars and crosses: cosmic balance and divine blessing.

• Dragons and eagles: protection, struggle, guardianship.

• Buta: flame, seed, eternity.

• Hands-on-hips figure: feminine power, fertility.

• Eyes and amulets: protection from evil.

The same motif shifts in meaning from one culture to another. A diamond in Georgia may echo mountain peaks, while in Azerbaijan it becomes a medallion of order, and in Kurdistan a tribal marker. Carpets share a vocabulary, but every culture writes its own poetry.

Carpets, Faith, and the Threshold of Death

Religion shaped not only motifs but also how carpets were lived with.

In Muslim homes, the prayer rug was indispensable — a portable mosque, a mihrab woven into wool. The faithful knelt upon it five times a day, creating sanctity even in the humblest hut.

Armenian Christians placed carpets before altars, treating them as sacred coverings, not unlike vestments. To tread on them in church was to step onto sanctified ground.

Death, too, found its place in carpets. The famous Pazyryk carpet (5th century BCE, found in a frozen tomb in Siberia) already showed the tradition of burying the dead with textiles. In the Caucasus and Kurdistan, carpets sometimes accompanied coffins or wrapped the deceased, symbolizing honor and protection.

Among Yazidis, funerary rites included shrouding with white cloth, sometimes laid with patterned textiles believed to carry protective power. In some Muslim and Kurdish traditions, carpets were laid under the body or used in memorial ceremonies. While orthodox Islam prescribes simplicity in burial, local practice often brought the family’s most treasured textile into the ritual, as if the threads could carry the soul safely beyond.

Carpets thus moved with people from cradle to grave, from first prayer to last.

Differences Across Borders

Though wool and knots bind them, each tradition carries its fingerprint:

• Georgia: geometric austerity of mountain kilims and the softness of lowland pile.

• Armenia: mythic beasts and Christian symbols, cosmologies in wool.

• Azerbaijan: dazzling diversity, each region a school of design.

• Turkey: symmetrical knots uniting nomadic kilims and Ottoman court carpets.

• Iraqi Kurdistan: rugged strength, tribal codes, earthy hues.

Religion added further distinctions: crosses in Armenian rugs, mihrabs in Muslim prayer rugs, funerary carpets in Yazidi and Kurdish practice.

What unites them is the sense that carpets are not luxuries but necessities — spiritual, social, and emotional.

Why It Matters Today

To travel through these lands with open eyes is to realize that every carpet is a storybook. It tells of women bent over looms, of dye-pots steaming with herbs, of shepherds shearing sheep in spring, of families celebrating when a rug comes off the loom.

In a world of machine-made textiles, choosing a handmade carpet is more than decoration. It is a gesture of preservation, a way of honoring the voices of grandmothers who wove their lives into knots.

Carpets are not static relics. They are living archives. And as long as people in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Kurdistan continue to weave, the story continues.

So when you unroll a handmade rug in your own home, pause for a moment. Let your fingers trace the patterns. Listen. You may hear mountains, prayers, songs, and stories — threads of memory stretching back centuries, carrying you eastward with every knot.