The Craft Map

Three towns, four crafts, and a name that fits only one of them. Yazd is desert; Shiraz is a garden city on a plain; Kermanshah is in the Zagros mountains. Two of the crafts here are also recorded elsewhere in Iran, and the Shiraz versions are not the same proposition as the Isfahan ones.

Yazd: Termeh

In the central desert, Yazd has woven fine cloth for centuries and termeh is its signature: wool, later silk, on a twill structure, woven since at least the Safavid period. The loom takes two people, a weaver and an assistant who orders the weft colours, and output runs to twenty-five or thirty centimetres a day. A record should name the workshop, because the rate makes quantity meaningful and the town's name is used more widely than the town's looms could supply.

Kermanshah: Giveh

West, in the Zagros, giveh is made across the rural and mountainous parts of the province. The upper is nalbinding worked by women at home with a javaldooz needle, in a technique older than knitting; the sole is made by men in workshops. It is summer footwear, light, breathable and built for distance, and it is made without a left or a right. A record should say what the sole is, since traditional textile and leather have largely given way to rubber.

Shiraz: The Manuscripts and the Inlay

Shiraz carries both miniature painting and khatam inlay in this mapping, and in both cases its position differs from Isfahan's. Its painting school ran from the mid-fourteenth century to the early sixteenth, matured under the Timurids around 1410 to 1420, and was notable for producing manuscripts for sale rather than for a single library. Its inlay belongs to a bazaar economy. Naming Shiraz rather than Iran is therefore a substantive statement about period and about customer.

Also on the Map

The Uraman country, where a distinct variant of the shoe is made with a sole of damp cotton pounded with a fist-sized tool. Isfahan and Tabriz, which hold the court and export versions of two of these crafts and should not be conflated with these. And the wool itself, which is what a termeh actually is before it is anything else. Which town, and then for whom: on this map the second answer is the one that separates these crafts from the famous ones.

The Cities That Sold

Isfahan worked for a court and Tabriz worked for an export designation. The three towns here worked for buyers, and it shows in what they made. From around the 1340s Shiraz was a centre for the production of fine illustrated manuscripts intended for sale rather than for a single patron's library, which is an unusual thing to be able to say about medieval book production anywhere. Yazd's woven silks and wools were luxury cloth for anyone who could afford them. Kermanshah's footwear was for walking. Different price points entirely, and the same underlying relationship: a maker and a customer, with no court in between.

Four Periods in One Painting Town

The Shiraz school was established under the Il-Khans in the middle of the fourteenth century and ran to the beginning of the sixteenth, and its history divides cleanly. There are the years to the end of Inju rule, the Muzaffarid decades of the 1350s and 1360s, the period from 1409 to 1415 when the Timurid prince Iskandar Sultan governed the city, and the decade from 1435 following his cousin's death. The school matured around 1410 to 1420. For a collector this granularity is useful in a way that a general attribution to Persia never is: Shiraz manuscript painting can be argued about by decade.

Twenty-Five Centimetres

Termeh is a fine cloth of wool, and later silk, built on a twill structure and woven in Yazd since at least the Safavid period. What defines it is not the material but the pace and the staffing. The loom needs more than one person: the weaver works the structure while an assistant, the goushvareh-kesh, arranges the colours of the weft as the cloth advances. A capable weaver produces twenty-five to thirty centimetres in a day. There are very few crafts in which a second person exists purely to manage colour order, and it is the clearest indication of how much pattern a termeh is carrying.

The Shoe Made by Two Households

A giveh is made in two halves by two different people in two different places. The upper is worked by women at home, using a heavy needle called a javaldooz, in nalbinding, a looped-and-sewn technique that predates both knitting and crochet by a long way. The sole is made by men in workshops, because compressing and shaping it takes strength. One object, two trades, two locations, two genders, and neither half is a finished thing on its own. In the Uraman variant the sole is built from damp cotton pounded and moulded with a fist-sized tool.

Why Yazd Wove Anything at All

The town sits in the central desert and its whole built form is an answer to that: wind towers to move air, covered lanes to hold shade, and an underground water system that made settlement possible in the first place. A place like that has no agricultural surplus to trade, so it trades skill. Yazd's position on the routes across the plateau gave it customers, and what it could offer them was workmanship rather than produce. Textiles are the classic output of exactly that situation, and Yazd has been producing them for long enough that the town and the trade are difficult to describe separately.

The Patron Institution

There is no single patron here, and that is the point of the card rather than a gap in it. Shiraz had governors who commissioned, but its distinctive output was speculative production for a market. Yazd had merchants. Kermanshah had customers with feet. None of these three crafts depended on one institution's continued solvency, which is why none of them collapsed when a dynasty did, and it is a genuinely different survival mechanism from the court crafts elsewhere in this collection.

What a Market Does to a Craft

Making for sale rather than for a patron has consequences visible in the objects. Shiraz manuscripts are more standardised than court work, because a workshop producing for an unknown buyer repeats what sells. Termeh developed recognisable repeating patterns for the same reason. And a giveh is identical left and right because that halves the complexity of making and stocking it. Efficiency is not a modern intrusion into these crafts. It is in their design, because somebody had to be able to afford them.

Arts, Crafts and Living Ateliers

Yazd's termeh looms are indoors and slow, with two people working in coordination and the cloth advancing a hand's width in a day. Kermanshah's giveh production is split between houses and workshops, and the two halves meet only at assembly. Shiraz's painting tradition survives as collections and as a modern practice rather than as a manuscript industry; the city's living craft is inlay work and metal, in the bazaar quarters. Three towns, three completely different working rhythms, and no shared workshop culture to speak of. What unites them is commercial rather than technical.

Reading a Termeh

Turn it over. A handwoven termeh carries its pattern in the structure, with floats and a legible reverse, where a printed or machine-jacquard imitation does not. Look at the density of the pattern and remember the rate: an elaborately patterned piece of any size represents weeks rather than days. Ask what the fibre is, since traditional termeh is wool and the silk versions are later and different in handle. And ask whether it was woven in Yazd, because the name travels further than the town does. Termeh is now woven in several places and printed in many more, and the word alone establishes nothing.

Reading a Giveh

The upper is where the craft is. Nalbinding produces a dense, slightly ridged fabric that does not unravel when cut, which is the quickest way to tell it from knitting, and a hand-worked upper shows the small irregularities of a needle rather than the regularity of a machine. Check the sole for what it actually is, since traditional textile and leather soles have largely given way to rubber and the difference is rarely volunteered. And do not be surprised that the pair is identical: that is correct, not a fault.

Shiraz, Without Repeating Isfahan

Two of the crafts recorded against this destination, miniature painting and khatam inlay, are also recorded at Isfahan, where the technique and the court context belong. What is specific to Shiraz is different. Its manuscript tradition is older, it is commercial in origin, and its finest period is Timurid rather than Safavid. Its inlay work sits within a bazaar economy rather than a court workshop system. A record that says Persian miniature and stops has skipped two centuries and a change of customer. Both facts are recoverable from the object by anyone who knows to look for them, which is the argument for naming the town on the record.

What Two People at One Loom Actually Means

The staffing of a termeh loom is the part worth understanding before assessing a piece. One person cannot both work the structure and order the weft colours as the pattern advances, so the second role exists for the pattern alone. That has two consequences for a buyer. The first is cost: every centimetre carries two wages, not one. The second is that pattern complexity and labour are directly proportional in a way they are not in printed or jacquard cloth, where an elaborate design costs no more to produce than a plain one. On a termeh, elaboration is the price.

Ateliers, Villages and Artisan Encounters

Yazd is the most rewarding of the three for a visitor, since the weaving is visible and the town's whole fabric, the wind towers and the covered lanes, explains the climate the cloth was made in. Kermanshah's giveh making is rural and dispersed through villages in the province, and reaching it takes intent. Shiraz offers gardens, the bazaar and the collections rather than a manuscript workshop, and being clear about that in advance prevents disappointment.

Tourwit Editions and Provenance

Tourwit works directly with termeh weavers in Yazd and giveh-making households in Kermanshah province rather than through intermediaries. Artisans are paid before the work begins and retain the major share of what a piece realizes. Editions are limited by what a loom can advance in a day and by what a needle can work, and each work is documented at source with its town, its makers, and for a giveh both halves of it, so that the record travels with the object.

Why These Works Matter

Craft collecting tends to prize the court object, and these three are a useful corrective. A termeh was luxury cloth sold to whoever could pay. A Shiraz manuscript was made on speculation. A giveh was made to be worn out. All three are the products of a working economy rather than a patron's taste, and they survived precisely because they were never dependent on one. That is a different kind of pedigree and it is worth understanding as one rather than as its absence.

The Sacred Year

The Iranian year is solar and its great fixed point is the spring equinox, which is older than Islam in this country and is kept by everyone. Around it sit observances that differ sharply between these three towns, because Yazd holds something the others do not.

Entering Festival Time

Nowruz falls at the equinox and runs for days, and its practical effect on a traveller is total: workshops close, families travel, and a craft town becomes a domestic one for a fortnight. Its practical effect on the crafts is that new cloth and new clothing belong to it. Termeh is a giving fabric, used for wrapping and for the spread laid out at the new year, and the demand for it is seasonal in a way the weaving rate makes difficult: a piece cannot be produced quickly to meet a deadline.

Yazd, and the Older Calendar

Yazd holds Iran's most significant continuing Zoroastrian community, and with it a set of observances that predate the Islamic calendar entirely, kept at fire temples and at hillside shrines. The seasonal festivals of that tradition mark the turning of the agricultural year rather than a prophetic history. For a card about textiles this matters because it explains the town's unusual continuity: Yazd has been a place of minority communities and long memories, and its crafts have the same quality of having simply gone on.

Public Rituals and Private Worlds

The Shia calendar runs alongside, and Muharram is observed across all three towns with processions and mourning gatherings. In Kermanshah, a province with a large Kurdish population, the observances carry regional character, and the spring festival of Nowruz is celebrated with an emphasis and a repertoire of its own. The footwear belongs to that world in an ordinary way: it is what people wear.

Culture in Motion

Shiraz's calendar is literary as much as devotional. The tombs of Hafez and Saadi are visited continuously and particularly on the days associated with them, and the city's self-image is built on poetry rather than on manufacture. That is worth registering when looking at its manuscript tradition. A town that produced illustrated books commercially for two centuries is also the town that treats its poets as its principal inhabitants, and the two facts belong together.

The Season the Shoe Belongs To

Giveh is summer footwear and is worn accordingly, which gives the craft a working year with the making and the wearing at opposite ends of it. Uppers are worked through the cold months in houses where there is little else to do outdoors, and the finished shoes are sold as the weather turns. That is an old and unremarkable arrangement, and it is the reason the craft has survived in villages: it occupies the part of the year that would otherwise be idle, and it does not compete with agricultural work.

Etiquette and Presence

During Muharram, mourning processions are not spectacle and photography should not be assumed. At Zoroastrian sites in and around Yazd, access varies and some places are restricted to the community; ask rather than walk in. In weaving houses, a termeh loom under tension should not be leaned on or touched, and in a giveh-making household the work is domestic and the courtesy is the same as anywhere a craft is practised in someone's living space.

Festivals as Lived Heritage

The calendar explains the demand rather than the form here. Termeh is bought and given at the new year, which is why the trade's year has a shape. A giveh is summer footwear, so its season is the hot months and its making is the cold ones. Neither object is ritual equipment, and neither was made for a ceremony. They are goods, made to a rhythm set by when people buy things, which is the most ordinary and least often stated relationship a craft can have with a calendar, and one that cards about craft usually decline to admit.