Founder

Safiye Gümüş Şahan

Financier. Trader. The woman who went looking for goods and found craft.

Safiye Gümüş Şahan spent two decades in finance, accounting, and international trade — buying, selling, moving things across borders. She understood supply chains, margins, and the arithmetic of commerce. What she couldn’t account for was the question of what those things carried with them.

Every object that crosses a border carries a story. Most supply chains are designed to erase that story — to standardise, to anonymise, to make everything interchangeable. Safiye spent two decades watching this happen. Navohi is what she decided to do about it.

She is based between İzmir and London. She travels — to Lagos, to Kyoto, to Oaxaca, to Tokat — to find artists whose visual language is rooted in a place, a tradition, a way of seeing that no algorithm could replicate. She brings that language to silk from Şaki, Azerbaijan. She is particularly committed to amplifying women artists and artisans whose work is too often invisible to the world beyond their own community.

safiye@navohi.com

The journey that started everything

She went looking for silk. She found something older.

Safiye first traveled to Şaki, Azerbaijan, looking for the right silk for the project she had been planning for years. She found the silk. But she also found Kiş village — a few kilometres outside the city — where the oldest Christian church in the Caucasus still stands, and where a bronze bust of the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl watches over the village square. Heyerdahl spent decades excavating at Kiş, convinced that the petroglyphs of nearby Gobustan — boat carvings 8,000 years old — proved a connection between the ancient Caucasus and the Norse world. He died believing this. The people of Şaki erected his bust in gratitude. Standing at that bust, Safiye understood that she was not building a textile brand. She was building a bridge between worlds that had always been connected — and had forgotten that they were.

Kiş village, Azerbaijan. The Albanian Church is considered the oldest Christian structure in the Caucasus, dating to the 1st century AD.

In her own words

“I spent twenty years in trade learning how the world moves goods from one place to another. I spent those same years watching those goods lose their story somewhere in the supply chain. Navohi is my attempt to build a supply chain that the story survives.”

“The kelaghayi masters of Şaki do not write their technique down. They never have. The knowledge lives in the hands, transmitted from grandmother to granddaughter by touch. When I first watched Narmin Hasanova press a galib into silk, I understood what I had been missing in twenty years of finance: the value of the thing that cannot be documented.”

“I am not trying to save a tradition. Traditions don’t need saving — they need an audience. My job is to find the audience for people whose work has always deserved one.”

— Safiye Gümüş Şahan

The name

NAVOHI

Navohi is a Turkic word. It means ‘the one who writes’ — the scribe, the one who leaves a mark, the one who ensures the memory does not disappear with the hand that made it. It is also the name of Alisher Navoiy — the 15th-century Uzbek poet who wrote in Chagatai Turkic at a time when the language of literature and power in Central Asia was Persian. He chose the vernacular. He chose to be understood by the people of his own place. Navohi the brand makes the same choice: the material that comes from the valley, the technique that has never been written down, the artist who learned from their grandmother. The specific over the generic. The rooted over the universal. The scribe who leaves a mark.

Are you an artist?

Navohi is always looking for artists whose work is rooted in a place, a tradition, a material — whose visual language was not invented but inherited and deepened. If that is you, Safiye would like to hear from you.

Submit Your Work →