Kurdish Tablecloth Kilim Designs in Northern Khorasan

Iran is home to various tribes and clans, each of which has a rich heritage and a mysterious background. One of these tribes is the Kormanj people who migrated to Khorasan from the west of the country during the Safavid era and today, with the passage of time and a result of their relations with other ethnicities in the region, many changes have taken place in their culture and art. Handwoven products made by the Kormanj people of North Khorasan are among the indigenous arts of this region. For the Kormanj, bread has always been especially important as they believe that bread is blessed food and the main source of sustenance. So, women of the Kormanj nomads made special cloths to keep bread in them. Those cloths are now known as Kurdish tablecloth kilim. Originally used to store bread, today they are often used as rugs or decorative works of art. Kurdish tablecloth kilims have a variety of designs and motifs. Patterns are often formed in the minds of their creators rather than being pre-designed. The main creators of Kurdish tablecloths are women and girls who are inspired by the natural world. Although today some weavers do not adhere to old patterns and weave newer ones due to changes in lifestyle, in most cases, the patterns are still reminiscent of the early nomadic lifestyle in this region. Once nomadic, they designed these motifs based on the nature and what they saw around them. Now that they have settled in one place, they have moved further away from the original designs, but some of those designs are still visible. Semantically, the motifs of Kurdish tablecloths are derived from the beliefs of the previous generations and express the cultural concepts of a nomadic society with a visually coherent structure. There are four groups of geometric, plant, animal and human designs. Animal motifs are more frequent than the others, due to the nature of the nomadic lifestyle. Nomadic dependence on animals is a necessity of their lifestyle and this is reflected in Kurdish tablecloth motifs. Animal motifs can take abstract forms like butterflies, symbolic forms like a ram’s horn and naturalistic forms that depict different domestic and wild animals. Among the human motifs, pictures of girls appear more often, mainly because women and girls have often been the weavers of these tablecloth kilims. In terms of style, the patterns can be divided in two categories of abstract and naturalistic styles. Although old designs and motifs are changing due to the change in the people’s lifestyle in North Khorasan, most of the motifs and designs are still the same as the old ones. The purpose of this article is to introduce the patterns of Kurdish tablecloth kilim and explain how they came into being. The data was collected through field method by conducting interviews and observation. Adopting a descriptive-analytical approach, different types of designs were studied and classified.