Persian Carpet Hamedan / Persian carpet Hamedan

Hamadan is one of the oldest cities in the world and has been an important commercial and administrative center of Iran for several centuries. In the 6th century BC, under the name Ecbatana, it was the capital of the Median kingdom and later the summer residence of the Persian Achaemenid dynasty. The city is located on an extensive plateau at an altitude of 1,800 meters at the foot of Mount Alvand, where a climate with mild summers and cold winters prevails. Due to its strategically important location between ancient Persia and Mesopotamia, the city was frequently targeted by various armies. It was conquered by Alexander the Great, and later in the eleventh century, the Seljuks occupied the entire Hamadan region and neighboring Azerbaijan. Despite the fact that the entire area was marked by the cultural influence of Turkic-Altaic peoples, the Persian language (Farsi) is still spoken in Hamadan today, unlike the surrounding countryside where the Turkish dialect predominates in speech. Carpets from more than 600 villages west and north of Hamadan await buyers at the Hamadan bazaar. The population of these villages also includes numerous Kurds, through whom carpets from Bijar and Sanandaj also find their way to the bazaars, causing confusion in determining the origin of the carpet. A few decades ago, each village had a distinctive combination of patterns and colors in their carpets, so that merchants from the Hamadan bazaars could quickly recognize a genuine Hamadan. Characteristic of Hamadan carpets is that they have one transverse cotton thread between two rows of knots, the knots are symmetrical, the basic structure is always cotton, with the exception of some very old carpets. Baluchi and Bakhtiari nomads also use this manufacturing technique, but differ from them in the type of wool. The more important carpet-making areas are Dergazin, Mehriban, Khamseh, Borchalou, and in one area alone there can be more than 40 villages. In the 16th century, Safavid Shah Tahmasp presented a carpet from the Dergazin area to Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, which means that in addition to traditional carpets, they were also able to make finer carpets for courts here.