{"id":2291,"date":"2019-03-11T10:29:56","date_gmt":"2019-03-11T04:59:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/?p=2291"},"modified":"2019-11-20T02:21:48","modified_gmt":"2019-11-19T20:51:48","slug":"travels-of-a-carpet-from-a-persian-otagh-jolodasti-to-a-georgian-living-room","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/travels-of-a-carpet-from-a-persian-otagh-jolodasti-to-a-georgian-living-room\/","title":{"rendered":"Travels of a carpet: From a Persian otagh jolodasti to a Georgian living room"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

TEXT & PHOTOGRAPHS BY NADIA DJAVANSHIR
Edinburgh, Scotland<\/em><\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I like to imagine possessions,\nparticularly aged ones, as having a soul or at least bearing imprints of the\nsouls that have had meaningful contact with them. It’s fun to envision all that\nthese objects have seen or heard over the years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve always been attached to things and history, perhaps because my own family\u2019s is very fractured. Things<\/em> denote some form of concreteness, presence, permanence, all things that I seek. My father\u2019s family are Muhajirs<\/em>, Muslim refugees who moved from present day India to settle in Pakistan, after the Partition of India in 1947. They brought nothing with them except their title of Chaudhary and stories of their family haveli built on legends. All was left behind and the family started afresh. This was a cycle that repeated itself when my father left Pakistan to move to the UK so everything that surrounded me had no tangible history to it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Persian
Persian carpet bought from Qom, Iran more than 50 years ago<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

My husband on the other hand harks\nfrom a family where both his Iranian father and French mother had family homes\nand heirlooms that went back more than a hundred years. Some of these wonderful\nobjects have made their way in to my family home, treasured for their beauty,\nvalue and of course the memories attached to them. Keeping these material\nobjects serve as a loving reminder of the people who have passed before them\nand continue a link between their past and present. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    One such thing is a beautiful Persian carpet, which started its life in Qom where my husband\u2019s grandparents, Parvin Keyhani and Hossein Djavanshir, bought it while on holiday more than 50 years ago. This city in Iran is known to be famous for its saints and its carpets. Qom has a relatively new place in the history of carpet weaving as ateliers sprung up in the early 19th century but quickly established a reputation of some of the finest, and consequently expensive silk and wool carpets in the world. The carpets often represented a garden, and they chose a beautiful Herati pattern, ubiquitous for the repetitive, almost geometric, floral motifs. In the centre is a medallion, a tradition harking back to early 15th century Persian Manuscript covers.  The medallion has four flowers coming off at each corner topped with a palm tree motif.  Back in Tehran, the carpet occupied a place of pride in the otagh jolodasti <\/em>or living room (as opposed to the mehmaan khane<\/em> or formal salon) of their home.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"Parvin
    Parvin Keyhani and Hossein Djavanshir, (Nadia\u2019s husband\u2019s paternal grandparents) who bought the carpet<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

    My husband\u2019s father, Firouzan and\nhis French wife, Madeleine lived nearby and one day while sipping tea with her\nfather-in-law, Madeleine commented on how beautiful the carpet was. The next\nday it was delivered to her home by her brother-in-law. There is a saying in\nIran when someone compliments something in your home they say \u2018pishkesh\u2019<\/em>, which means \u2018its yours\u2019, and\nwell in this instance it literally was! That carpet travelled with Madeleine\nand Firo who left Iran for France and stayed with them in the west and then\nnorth of the country. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    It seems the carpet\u2019s travels where\nnot over as in a similar turn of events my in-laws gifted the carpet to my\nhusband and I and it now lives in Edinburgh with us. Quite a journey indeed! It\nis laid out in our otagh jolodasti<\/em>\nand is trampled on by my two sons daily. It makes me happy to think that a\ncarpet that travelled from Iran to Scotland via France is being walked on by\nthe fourth generation of Djavanshirs. I hope it will carry on being used in the\nfuture and will have weaved within it the stories of the family and the lands\nit has lived in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    One such thing is a beautiful Persian carpet, which started its life in Qom where my husband\u2019s grandparents bought it while on holiday more than 50 years ago. In the centre is a medallion, a tradition harking back to early 15th century Persian Manuscript covers. The medallion has four flowers coming off at each corner topped with a palm tree motif. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2310,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,8,9],"tags":[394,14,393,395],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2291"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2291"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2291\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2787,"href":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2291\/revisions\/2787"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}