Turkmen Carpets: Weaving, Pattern and Cultural Identity across Central Asia

What can a carpet tell you that a chronicle cannot? For the herding peoples of Central Asia who moved with their flocks, woven wool was the place where household life, tribal identity and a sense of beauty were all set down. Turkmen carpets are the best-known part of that record: deep red pile, rows of octagonal medallions called guls, and a whole family of bags, door hangings and animal trappings made for life in a tent. On Day 9 of our small group tour through Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, the group visits the Museum of Turkmen Carpets in Ashgabat, which holds the largest museum collection of Turkmen carpets.

What makes Turkmen carpets distinctive

A Turkmen carpet is a knotted wool pile weaving made by one of the Turkmen tribes of Central Asia. The art historian Walter Denny, writing in Encyclopaedia Iranica, describes sheep’s wool as the preferred fibre, with occasional touches of silk or cotton, and red as the dominant colour, drawn from madder root and varied with mordants into shades from walnut brown to scarlet. Britannica notes that most Turkmen pieces are knotted with the asymmetrical knot, though some use the symmetrical one.

What sets them apart is not only colour or technique but discipline. The main field of a typical Turkmen carpet is a repeated grid of guls, medallion-like motifs, usually octagonal and angular, set in rows. UNESCO, which added traditional Turkmen carpet making to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2019, describes dense textures and clear, linear geometric patterns linked to the main Turkmen tribes. For the neighbouring tradition to the south, with its curving floral designs and court workshops, our article on the history of Persian carpets makes a useful comparison.

The tribes and their guls

Denny names six major Turkmen tribes before the Russian conquest: the Tekke, Salor, Saryk, Yomut, Chaudor and Ersari. The Tekke were the dominant tribe, and by the nineteenth century, Britannica records, they held the oases of Merv and Tejen. The Salor, by Denny’s account, were traditionally the most important carpet weavers, a primacy already noted in a seventeenth-century source.

Each tribe wove its own family of guls, and Britannica describes the Tekke main carpet as a field of repeated octagonal guls in rows, with the Saryk and Salor weaving similar carpets whose different guls mark a different tribal identity. The Ersari, now mostly in Uzbekistan and northern Afghanistan, wove coarser rugs with larger guls. But the picture is not as tidy as a set of badges. Denny stresses that motifs were exchanged and modified between tribes over time, so specialists now identify a weaving’s origin from its structure, materials and colours as much as from its guls.

Is the gul a tribal emblem?

Partly, and the question is still argued over. The gul is widely associated with particular Turkic tribes, but its origin is debated: Denny reports the carpet scholar Jon Thompson’s view, which he finds the most convincing, that the gul is linked to a pre-Islamic, Buddhist tradition. Older Western readings of guls as elephant feet, tent plans or totemic birds have, according to Thompson, no basis in weaving tradition.

How specialists tell the tribes apart

Because guls travelled between tribes, specialists look closely at how a carpet was made. Denny sets out some of the differences. Salor pieces are knotted asymmetrically, open to the left, with the warps tightly packed on two levels. Tekke knots are generally asymmetrical and open to the right. Saryk pile is almost always symmetrically knotted, while Yomut weavers used all three knot types, sometimes within a single carpet.

Design adds further clues. Britannica notes that some Yomut guls are adapted from Persian palmettes, and that the Chaudor and Arabatchi, more widely scattered than the larger tribes, kept designs of their own. The Ersari’s coarser weavings with large guls, Britannica adds, are usually marketed as “Afghans”. Read together, knot, wool, colour and pattern let a specialist place a weaving with some confidence, even when its gul alone would mislead.

A tent furnished in wool

Turkmen weaving makes most sense inside the tent. Britannica notes that rugs were sized to fit felt tents, even after many Turkmen had settled, with a main carpet of about 1.8 by 3 metres. Around it, Denny lists the full furnishing of a nomad household: the main carpet on the tent floor; storage bags from the large chuval through the mafrash to the small torba; door surrounds and woven door hangings called ensi; and long horizontal tent bands.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes how an ensi likely covered a tent’s entrance, its thick pile keeping out the weather and bringing colour and warmth inside. The Met’s own example, dated to the first half of the nineteenth century and attributed to present-day Turkmenistan or Afghanistan, is a substantial piece of about 1.9 by 1.4 metres, with wool warp, weft and pile and touches of cotton in the pile: a door that could be rolled up and carried. The Met also stresses how portable Turkmen household goods were, made for a household whose every possession, even the home itself, had to be collapsible and portable. The weavings were not decorations added to a home. They were the home’s walls, doors, cupboards and floor. That domestic role has outlasted the tent: UNESCO notes that Turkmen carpets are still used today as floor coverings and wall decorations, in houses rather than on the move.

Weavings for weddings and life’s turning points

Some pieces were made for a single day. Denny describes pentagonal asmalyk and rectangular kejebe animal trappings, together with bridal litter trappings, made for special occasions. The Met’s catalogue entry for a nineteenth-century asmalyk explains that such trappings were used in Turkmen weddings, when the bride rode a richly decorated camel to her new home, and that they were woven by the bride herself to show her skill, with patterns that often symbolised fertility. Not every trapping was knotted. The Met’s example is embroidered in silk on wool, and the museum notes that others were made in pile or in felt appliqué, with the red-on-white lattice known as ahik among the fertility designs. Each method left a different kind of record of the bride’s hand.

UNESCO’s listing extends this beyond weddings. It notes that special carpets are woven for childbirth, weddings, and prayer and mourning rituals, that skills pass down within families, and that the craft is seen as a sign of Turkmen cultural identity and unity. In that sense a family’s weavings were an archive of its marriages, its rituals and its weavers’ own hands.

How old are the Turkmen carpets you can see today?

Mostly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Denny notes that few surviving Turkmen weavings can be safely dated before about 1750, though nineteenth-century pieces reflect a long and conservative tradition. Systematic collecting and study began only with the Russian conquest, Denny records; a collection formed by General Bogolyubov was published in St Petersburg in 1907.

From madder to the modern loom

The traditional palette came from plants and animals the weavers knew. Denny describes madder reds deepened or brightened with mordants such as dried yoghurt, alum and urine. Synthetic dyes later joined them, used alongside natural dyes since about 1910. UNESCO describes carpets still woven on horizontal and vertical looms, mainly in coloured wool, with designs drawn from the plants, animals and surroundings of the weaver.

The carpet as a national emblem

The carpet is also a symbol of the state. Britannica records that when Turkmenistan adopted its national flag in February 1992, the vertical red stripe at its hoist carried five carpet guls representing the Salor, Tekke, Saryk, Yomut and Chaudor tribes; an olive wreath was added beneath them in 1997. Turkmen Carpet Day has been a national holiday since 1992, celebrated on the last Sunday in May, and UNESCO notes that the annual day brings communities together around the craft.

That official celebration also has a modern monument. The Museum of Turkmen Carpets opened in Ashgabat in October 1994. Its collection, the largest of Turkmen carpets held by any museum, includes more than a thousand carpets from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It also holds a carpet of about 300 square metres, woven in 2001 to mark ten years of independence, which entered the Guinness Book of Records in 2003. Our article on Ashgabat and the making of a modern capital explains how monuments like this belong to the city’s official story of the nation.

What does the tour see at the Museum of Turkmen Carpets?

The museum is part of the Day 9 sightseeing in Ashgabat. The tour page describes it as holding the largest collection of Turkmen carpets, from the medieval period through to the twentieth century, including one of the biggest handmade carpets in the world. The rest of the day continues in the city before a late-afternoon flight to Mary.

How physically demanding is this tour?

The tour is rated Level 3, Moderate to Challenging. The tour page says participants must be in excellent health, extremely mobile and live an active lifestyle, and that activities may include up to six hours a day of continuous strenuous, moderate to fast-paced activity over varied terrain. Ask a Tour Specialist how the Ashgabat days are paced.

Turkmen carpets beyond Turkmenistan

The weavings follow the tribes, and the tribes did not stay within today’s borders. Denny records that many Yomut and Tekke groups live and weave in northern Persia and many Ersari settled in northwestern Afghanistan, and Britannica notes that the Yomut now live mainly in northeastern Iran. Turkmen weaving is therefore a Central Asian tradition rather than a single national one. Our guide to Turkmenistan for curious travellers covers the country beyond its crafts, and our four-country journey through the Stans sets the carpet museum within the whole route.

Reading a people through its weaving

A Turkmen carpet rewards slow looking. The rows of guls speak of tribe and lineage, the bags and door hangings of a home that moved, the wedding trappings of a bride’s skill and a family’s alliances, and the five guls on the national flag of a modern state reaching back to that older world. In a museum gallery in Ashgabat, the archive is laid out on the walls.

Travelling in a small group of up to 16 travellers with an Odyssey Program Leader, you see the museum between the Parthian fortress of Nisa and the oasis city of Merv. If you would like to study the route’s landscapes and history in that way, our 28-day Stans tour gives the Museum of Turkmen Carpets its own place on the route.