Azernews.Az

By Amina Nazarli

Gorgeous colors, patterns and textures – beautiful Azerbaijani carpets – all these are the fruit of masters’ painstaking labor.

Unique Azerbaijani carpets are well-known all over the world for their quality and high artistic value. Besides, amazing and fantastic carpets of Azerbaijan represent a real mystery, leading one inside the fairy tales full of majestic feelings.

Antique Azerbaijani rugs are the honorary "residents" at the White House, State Department, and every important museums in the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louvre, Victoria and Albert Museum, Vatican, and the Hermitage.

The Land of Fire has seven carpet producing regions including Baku, Shirvan, Guba, Tabriz, Karabakh, Ganja and Gazakh and each of them had its own technology, typical patterns and colors.

To get acquaint foreigners and local population with the beauty and colorfulness of the national carpets, Baku will host the 5th International Symposium on Azerbaijani Carpets on October 17-20.

The four-day event with two full days of academic programs will offer a platform for dialogue of national and foreign scholars and collectors of Azerbaijani carpets.

The format of the international conference will be based on model of the symposium partner -- the International Conference on Oriental Carpets (ICOC). This organization has more than 35 years of experience in the study and promotion of oriental rugs in the West.

Since 2014, representatives of ICOC annually visit Baku, upon the invitation of the Culture and Tourism Ministry, to meet with Azerbaijani colleagues- rug experts and hold master classes and studying museum and private collections.

In late 2016, Alberto Boralevi, Chair of ICOC Academic Committee and Ben Evans, editor of the London HALI Publications (HLP) visited Baku, where they also offered a tour to the regions of Azerbaijan.

Following this trip, HALI decided to include new eight-day ‘HALI Carpet Tour’ tour package to the Symposium plan, which will take place on Baku-Tbilisi route with stops at carpet weaving centers of Azerbaijan.

Such routes to Georgia and Armenia are operating since 2015, said Asli Samadova, the representative of ICOC from Italy.

“Unfortunately, so far, Azerbaijan has remained out of sight of HALI Carpet Tour due to a lack of sufficient information about the country,” she clarified.

Besides academic session, the organizers of the symposium also plan to hold a cultural program that includes a series of exhibitions.

The Culture Ministry is working closely with leading world museums, first of all, Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Museum of Textiles in Washington, the collections of which feature unique Azerbaijani carpets and embroidery. The Ministry, following long negotiations, achieved consent of both museums to provide a unique and never before unexposed embroidery for the exhibition "Silk treasures: early Azerbaijani embroidery", which will be held from October 17 2017 to January 15, 2018 at the Azerbaijan National Museum of Art.

Overall, the exhibition will feature more than 70 Azerbaijani embroidery from foreign museums and private collections, many of which will be shown for the first time.

This will be an unprecedented exhibition, noted Samadova expressing hope that it will not leave indifferent neither citizens nor guests.

“Now we are in the preparatory stage, and there is still a lot to do. Although we have not unveiled much details, we are already aware that many foreign connoisseurs plan to come to Baku to see the embroidery, as there can be no second chance," she said.

The first Symposium was held under the patronage of UNESCO in 1983 on the initiative of Azerbaijani scientist Latif Karimov, the founder of carpet studies and Azerbaijani carpet history.

The 2007conference in Paris, at the UNESCO headquarters was dedicated to the celebration of the anniversary of Karimov. The 5th Symposium will be held with a 10-year break and coincides with the year of the celebration of anniversaries of Azerbaijan Carpet Museum.

Azerbaijan’s Carpet Museum established in Baku in 1967, being the first carpet museum in the world is the very place that can familiarize all the interested with the unique examples of the national carpets. A new carpet museum, designed in the form of a rolled carpet, opened in the Baku Seaside Park in 2014 and all carpets were transferred to this museum.

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Amina Nazarli is AzerNews’ staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @amina_nazarli

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