Rugs, Carpets and Palahses from Uzbekistan

The tradition of carpet weaving in Uzbekistan is ancient. Carpets, mainly woven by numerous home-workers in rural areas, are perfect in technique and design. Three types of carpets are common in Uzbekistan: short pile carpets gilyam, long pile carpets julkhirs, and palahs.

Carpet-making in Uzbekistan

The characteristic feature of short pile carpets is their red-brown tint, lit up by the harmony of light-colored details of the principal medallions, which usually appear in geometrical shapes.

Since ancient times, carpets with long pile, julkhirs, have been favored by rural inhabitants. This kind of carpet weaving was unknown to other peoples of Central Asia. Nowadays it enjoys wide popularity for its ornamentation and correspondence to modern trends in the world carpet making. Julkhirs are monumental in composition and simplicity of design, and are shown in color.

Palahs fabrics are diverse in Uzbekistan. These include: kokhma - a fabric, plain striped in various colors; terma and gadjari, a fabric woven in pattern with different methods of "crisscross overlap" technique and ornamented with rows of small geometrical vegetal and zoomorphic motifs; and arabi - a cloth, which is woven in the so-called ‘clearance' method.

All kinds of palahs fabrics are sometimes supplemented with the superposed design method. This complex and arduous method, which resembles embroidery, is called beshkashta. Over the past 50 years, the method of weaving and ornamenting arabi palahses has been practiced on a large scale in all Central Asian Republics.