Turkic World

The artists are grouped by where they draw from, not by where the silk is made. Every piece on this page was dyed in the same place — Şəki, in north-western Azerbaijan — regardless of which region the drawing came out of. The region is the origin of the pattern, not of the cloth.

That distinction is the whole arrangement. A drawing travels: it is sent, discussed, redrawn to survive a block, cut into pear or walnut, printed in hot wax and dyed in plant colour. What arrives at the end carries two places at once, and the piece is named in Azerbaijani because that is the language the vocabulary of the craft is in.

The collections below are cut by motif and by colour — buta, çələng, şəmsə, and the colour terms al, göy, yaşıl, bənövşə, qızıl — because that is how a kelaghayi has always been described. A piece is read by what is on it and what it was dyed in, not by which country its designer lives in.

So an artist from this region will appear across several collections, and a collection will hold work from several regions. Both indexes point at the same catalogue from different sides.

A kelaghayi is made in four stages, and the order never changes: the silk is woven, the stamps are cut, the pattern is printed, and last the cloth is dyed. Dyeing is the stage everything else answers to. The workshop it happens in has its own name, the kupkhana, and so does the person who does it — the boyaqchi, who was traditionally held to be the figure the whole process turns on.

The stamps are cut from hardwood, pear or walnut, and in Basqal there are households still printing with blocks more than three hundred years old. The block is charged with hot wax and pressed to the silk; wherever the wax sits, the dye cannot reach. Then the cloth goes into the vat, the wax is boiled out, and if the pattern calls for a second colour the whole sequence runs again. The master is handling boiling dye and heavy stencils throughout, which is why the craft has always been described as physical work rather than delicate work.

Only plants, tree bark and flowers go into the dye. The golden tones come from something as ordinary as onion skin. Because every step is done by hand, two scarves are never quite the same — the tradition takes that as a fact about the process rather than a flaw in it.