Nain

The town that wove cloaks#

Nain sits in central Iran, in the arid country along the edge of the central desert, southeast of the Karkas mountains.

What it was known for was aba — the loose outer garment, worn widely across the Middle East and particularly by Arab nomads. The Encyclopaedia Iranica lists Nain first among the places well known for manufacturing aba cloth, and notes that Nain's were often made of camel's hair and intended for winter wear.

So: not floors. Clothing. And not light summer cloth either — a heavy cloak for cold weather, made from an animal built for that landscape.

Then the cloth trade ended#

By the early 1920s the production of aba at Nain, described in the scholarship as "a major source of employment", had been discontinued.

The passage that records this records what it fed into. Across the Isfahan region, drought and the loss of older industries pushed towns toward carpet weaving for the European and American markets, beginning around 1921. Nain's collapsed cloak trade is named as one of those losses.

What happened next, and what we will not claim#

Nain is one of the best-known carpet names in Iran. How it got there is less documented than you would expect.

The standard account is that a man named Fatollah Haghighi led the town's conversion to carpet weaving, having studied the carpets of Isfahan and Kashan and taught what he learned to Nain's weavers. That account rests on family testimony rather than archival record. We have not been able to verify it and we are not going to present it as though we had.

You will also read that Nain carpets carry among the highest knot counts in Iran. We are not going to print a number for it. The figures in circulation come mostly from sales material, and the reference works that do publish knot counts — for Ardabil, for Mashhad, for Isfahan — publish none for Nain.

That silence is consistent. The Encyclopaedia Iranica's survey of Persian carpets runs to more than a dozen articles and has no entry on Nain's. Its account of Qajar-period production names fifteen weaving centres, from Kerman and Kashan to Tabriz and Mashhad, and Nain is not one of them.

Nain is a young tradition and we would rather say so. A carpet town that appears in the record only in the twentieth century is a more interesting fact than an invented Safavid pedigree, and unlike the pedigree, it cannot be contradicted.

What we can tell you about the pattern#

We can tell you what a Nain carpet looks like, because that is in front of us.

Ivory where other cities go dark. Cobalt rather than the deeper blues. A vine that travels instead of a medallion that holds. Red withheld until it means something.

What we cannot tell you, from any source we trust, is exactly how the town arrived at it. The two go together: a pattern this particular, with this little written about where it came from.

The circle#

Nain's looms stopped making cloth. The town's name now belongs to carpets.

We take a Nain carpet pattern and print it on cloth.

We are not claiming to have restored anything. A hundred years and an industrial supply chain sit between those two facts, and a printed cotton garment is not an aba. But of the cities we plan to work through, this is the one where the direction of travel reverses — and it happens to be the second collection rather than something we arranged.

No object#

The other collections on this site show a carpet from a museum as evidence that the pattern is older than us.

There is no Nain carpet in the Metropolitan Museum's Islamic collection, and there is not likely to be one in any comparable collection either. Those collections hold sixteenth-century court weaving. Nain enters the carpet record four hundred years later.

That absence is the most accurate thing we could show you about this collection.

About the house#

House of Abrash is new. The craft is not — and in Nain's case, the craft is not as old as people assume, which is exactly why we like it.

What abrash means →

See Tabriz →