Postcard from Khiva: weaving magic at the Silk Carpet Workshop

The recipe is simple. Take equal parts vine, apple and mulberry leaves, and stir them into a large vat of water over a roaring fire. Add a platter of sun-dried onion skins. When the time is right, drop in the looped skeins of spun silk. Stir to combine. Let the whole confection simmer away like a pot of herbal spaghetti. An hour later, when you lever out the steaming yarn, its fibres will have assumed a pigment midway between yellow and gold.

This is how Madrim Matkarimov begins his working day, dying silk in a small courtyard in Khiva, Uzbekistan. Madder root for red. Walnut husks for brown. Indigo for blue. It’s the first bit of alchemy in a long process which sees the delicate strands of the bombyx mori larva, or silkworm, transformed into something beautiful. The next stage happens a kilometre south in the Itchan Kala, Khiva’s ancient walled city.

It’s 20 years since the Khiva Silk Carpet Workshop opened for business, operating out of a restored 19th-century madrassa, set amid Khiva’s living museum of minarets and mausoleums. Given its local heritage, it’s perhaps surprising that the driving force for its foundation was an outsider. Christopher Aslan Alexander, an English writer, established the venture in 2002 with funding from Unesco and Operation Mercy, a Swedish development charity.

“Other carpet-sellers in Uzbekistan will tell you their carpets are pure silk, but they’re viscose from China, Pakistan and Afghanistan,” Alexander says. “We’re the only silk carpet workshop in the country that just sells what it makes.”

An hour later, in the workshop, Bakhtigul Qutlieva is hard at work in front of a large loom. Her right hand wields a six-inch-long implement called a hook-knife. A hook at one end manoeuvres the silk between the vertical warp threads, a blade at the other cuts the silk clear. Qutlieva’s hands move almost too fast to track; each fluid knot elicits a plinking music from the threads like the tuning of a stringed instrument. Despite her practised speed, progress is glacial. “This one will take six months to complete,” Matkarimov says.

It’s the first bit of alchemy in a long process which sees the delicate strands of the silkworm transformed into something beautiful

Though the workshop itself is just two decades old, its design styles and working practices are little different from those that put Khivan artisans on the map. For centuries, Khiva was a staging-post on the Silk Road, the last stop for caravans before crossing the desert to Persia. Wealth derived from the trade in spices, textiles and — up until the Russian annexation in 1873 — slaves found expression in the arts, in the majolica tiles that adorn the Pahlavan Mahmud Mausoleum and in the fretworked elm columns of the Juma Mosque. Carpets were an ostentation, as much an established way of displaying wealth as gold.

In the 20th century, however, Khiva’s artisanship mouldered. The market for silk waned during the Soviet era, when luxurious commodities were denounced as bourgeois. Khiva’s carpet makers turned to producing practical, hard-wearing woollen carpets, pigmented with chemical dyes.

It was the old craft — with its natural dyes and intricate tessellating designs — that the workshop sought to revive, while also providing jobs in a city where unemployment rates were high. All of the necessary inspiration was still there. Many of Alexander’s early templates were copied from the ornate decorations of Khiva’s tiles and timber. Some are derived from Timurid and Baburid miniatures, meticulous medieval paintings often depicting historical figures in conversation, cross-legged on elaborate rugs.

In A Carpet Ride to Khiva, his 2010 book, which chronicles the workshop’s creation, Alexander describes these miniatures as “blueprints, ready to be woven to life once more”.

When Alexander left Khiva in 2005, Matkarimov took up the reins. Soft-spoken and fastidious, with muscular forearms from years of stirring the dying vats, Matkarimov had worked as a painter during restoration works in the 1990s, lying on a scaffold as he painstakingly recoloured the faded ceiling artwork of the Kunya-Ark citadel and the resplendent harem of the Alla Kuli Khan palace. His intimate familiarity with Khivan motifs turned out to be a transferable skill.

Now Matkarimov is the workshop’s master dyer and designer, and oversees manufacture from concept to completion. He often works from photos, transposing the work of Khiva’s medieval craftsmen on to millimetre-squared graph paper, which is then handed to the weavers as a “cartouche”, balanced on the loom at eye-level to provide a knot-by-knot guide.

In another room, in the far corner of the madrassa courtyard, you can see the hard-won result. Rolled carpets are propped against a wall; dozens more are arrayed haphazardly on the floor. Each one has a singular style. Arabesques radiate around repeating polygons and Zoroastrian stars; others are dominated by calligraphic and vegetal scrolls.

Matkarimov smiles apologetically, and ducks back out into the courtyard. Half a dozen tourists have just come in from the street, eyes widening at the shimmering textures, the sacred geometries, the ageless allure of silk.

Among them might be a prospective buyer. Or maybe not. Prices start from about £1,000 for a carpet the size of a coffee table. “Everyone is welcome to look,” Matkarimov says.

Follow @ftweekend on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first