Baku festival: Carpets, modernism, eastern magic REPORT BY THE INDEPENDENT’S EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

The British newspaper The Independent has published a feature by the publication’s editor-in-chief, Geordie Greig, dedicated to the International Carpet Festival recently held in Baku.

Caliber.Az presents excerpts from the article below.

“The clinching argument for a long weekend to Baku, Azerbaijan’s ancient capital on the Silk Road, was that for one weekend only almost all the streets in the medieval Old Town would be covered by hand-woven carpets. There would be hundreds of them, laid head-to-head in a magical mosaic of colour and artful designs. I also fancifully conjectured that Shakespeare might have been considering the festival when, in The Tempest, he poetically extemporised how “the earth’s a carpet laid before the sun.

Well, Baku certainly took his word literally. The capital was transformed into a giant installation of colourful knots, threads and weaves covering its cobbled streets. Dealers, weavers, stitchers, collectors and historians gathered from 19 nations to debate and celebrate this ancient artistry, as some carpets, we learnt, were first woven more than 2,000 years ago.

It was an academic forum alongside a place for thousands of visitors to enjoy the festival’s dramatic street theatre, surreally coinciding with the Baku marathon, the country’s first international race with the full 26-mile course. This carpet fest was imaginative and startling, mirroring how Baku has redefined itself via its architecture: putting medieval and modernist masterpieces side by side.

Azerbaijan is certainly more present on the world stage. It straddled the world of petroeconomics and environmental policies when it hosted Cop 29 in 2024. It is now a fixture in the Formula One calendar and hosted the European winter sports championships this year.

Three nights is a perfect amount of time for a taster of the capital. Not only is the carpet museum in Baku the largest in the world, but it is even shaped like a folding rug. It shares the skyline with one of the great masterpieces of modernist architecture: Zaha Hadid’s Heydar Aliyev Centre, also designed to look like a surface that has been lifted, folded, and frozen in motion – very similar to the ripples of a carpet, a comparison that is made often. While a carpet is flexible and soft, the building imitates its folds with rigid concrete and steel. It is impossible to overestimate how in Azerbaijan, carpets are a major traditional art form.

A weekend is the ideal length of time for walking around the safe and easy city. In Baku, you can go from exploring medieval stone walls straight to futuristic parametric design in under 20 minutes. This walled city is a dense mix of Islamic, Persian and local Shirvan styles, with caravanserais, mosques and narrow lanes.

Reflecting the oil boom of the early 20th century are landmarks such as the Ismailiyya Palace, a Venetian Gothic revival building, the Azerbaijan State Philharmonic Hall with its Italian Renaissance influence and Baku City Hall, with its Beaux-Arts design. They are demonstrative of a time of optimism, when European architects reshaped the city into a kind of Paris of the East.

Back to the carpet festival, though, where Emin Mammadov was presiding over the affair. He is a dashing entrepreneur and chair of the carpet board, whose turbocharged ambition is to grow the festival, which is now in its third year.

This year, the link between painting and carpets was a key theme. One of the most dramatic revelations was the work of Aida Mahmudova, an acclaimed artist in Baku as well as an alumna of London’s Central St Martin’s, whose eclectic works combine powerful abstraction and something similar to Frank Auerbach’s encrusted, tactile, painted masterpieces.

Another highlight is the work of Assel Sabircangizi, or Assol, a Kazakh artist creating stunning portraits by brushing and spraying oil paint onto existing carpets.

In the Old City, with its echoes of Prague, it is delightful just to sit back and let the world go by in its maze of labyrinthine streets. Drinking the local wines and vodka in its tiny bars, or trying baklava in a tea room, is heavenly.

Leaving Baku early in the morning, I gazed out from my taxi at the two 21st-century Flame Towers. Nearby are the stone palaces, more than 500 years old. Few would argue with Shakespeare when he celebrated the intrinsic combination of power and passion seen through a carpet – and the impressiveness of a trip to Baku is similarly irrefutable,” wrote Geordie Greig.

By Bakhtiyar Abbasov