Meet Dr. Magomedkhan Magomedkhanov, proprietor of Khan's Rugs. ®

An ethnographer by training, Dr. Magomdkhanov opened a small carpet workshop outside Makhachkala in 1997, employing local weavers and dye masters.
Khan's Rugs produces less than a hundred one-of-a-kind carpets a year for a select group of international clients.

Dr. Magomedkhanov is a senior ethnographer at the Dagestan Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is also a consultant for the Dagestan Historical Museum on Textile Art. He studied ethnography at the University of St.Petersburg, as well as Oxford and Harvard universities. He has written widely on Dagestani traditions, in particular, textiles.

Behind the Loom.

Dagestani carpets have long been famous for their strong geometric designs
and vibrant, steadfast colors. Soviet industrialization, however, ruined the
industry with chemical dyes, shoddy workmanship and corrupt management.
Carpets in the true Dagestani tradition cannot be mass-produced.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Dr. Magomedkhanov, known to
his friends as Khan, launched his own workshop. He chose a small group of
trusted weavers steeped in traditional knowledge, and restored the use of
natural dyes. All his weavers are women and work from their own homes so as to
care for their children. Khan pays his staff twice the wages of state
factories. Subsequently, there is little turnover of staff.

Khan has traveled to numerous mountain villages to study local use of
vegetation - madder root, pomegranate, indigo, milkweed, rhododendron - for dye. He
also studied dyes under Josephine Powell, the prominent American textile
specialist. The painstaking work and artistry displayed by the weavers at
Khan's Rugs results in stunning creations every time, unrivaled anywhere.

"I want each carpet to be a work or art, better than the last," Khan says.
"The colors have to sing."

Ten percent of all profits from Khan's Rugs benefit child victims of war in
the Caucasus.