Georgia's ethnic minority keep rug-weaving alive

Since Zemfira Kajarova arrived in the hill village of Kosalari in southern Georgia as a newlywed almost 50 years ago, she has devoted herself to weaving the village's distinctive Persian-style woollen carpets.

The 65-year-old grandmother devotes hours each day to the painstaking work, sitting at the decades-old wooden loom in her living room, threading woollen yarn into thousands of individual knots.

"When I was 16, I got married and moved here," she said, adding that no one in her home village, about 40 km (25 miles) away, knew how to weave carpets.

After weaving, the carpets are carefully finished: shaved, beaten, and scorched with a gas burner, flaming off dust and loose ends.

For over a decade, Zemfira has been working with reWoven, a social enterprise initially started by a U.S. missionary, to find buyers willing to pay international prices for local rugs.

The group works with a network of weavers, all of them older women from Georgia's Muslim Azerbaijani ethnic minority.

Though influenced by Persian rugs, the Borchalo carpets produced by Zemfira and other local weavers are made of woollen yarn, rather than silk, and rely on bold, striking designs on a limited colour palette, instead of the floral motifs favoured in Iranian weaving.

"If we compare rugs to wine, then Iran is like France, and the Caucasus is like Italy," said William Dunbar, a volunteer co-director at reWoven.

He said: "Everyone knows about Iranian rugs and that still to this day is the global centre of handwoven rug production. But the Caucasus is just as good, but a bit smaller and less famous."

Under the Soviet Union, and under pressure from modern, mass-produced textiles, local rug-making had largely died out, with only a handful of older women in remote villages keeping the craft alive. Reuters