Carpet traders in Afghanistan face wolves, bandits and insurgents as they hunt down the last antique rugs on journeys full of peril
- Decades of conflict, displacement and urbanisation have forever changed the antique rug trade in Afghanistan, with the real deals increasingly difficult to find
- The carpets can fetch thousands of dollars on the international market, but fakes and cheap imitations are rife
In his quest to track down the last of Afghanistan’s antique rugs, Chari Allahqul has weathered high-country blizzards, suffered beatings from armed robbers and skirted fighting with insurgents.
Often on horseback with donkeys in tow, he travels deep into the jagged badlands of northern Afghanistan searching for hand-woven carpets made by the country’s nomadic tribes.
“The roads are dangerous, full of wolves and full of enemies. We have to spend nights in the forests or in the desert,” explains Allahqul, who travels with a hardy Afghan sheepdog to keep him safe while he sleeps.
Rug hunters can spend weeks passing through villages like sleuths along old caravan trails, offering cash or bartering with modern goods to amass a diverse selection of pieces they can later peddle in rug bazaars or to collectors. But the journeys are often full of peril.
Allahqul, who began carpet hunting as a child, says he was once clubbed with a Kalashnikov by bandits who passed over his carefully collected rugs while looking for cash, dismissing his wares as ageing junk. “They said, ‘These rugs are old rugs’ and threw them away,” he recalled with a grin, saying it took over two weeks to recover from the thrashing.
Dangers are nothing new to the job, according to Allahqul, who remembers his father telling the story of a friend who was eaten alive by wolves after being stranded in a snowstorm during a rug expedition decades ago. “The only thing they found were his shoes and the rugs,” he shrugs.