The Carpet Museum of Baku: the rolled-carpet building on the seafront, what is inside, how to read an Azerbaijani carpet and how to plan the visit

You can see it from halfway along the Baku seafront: a glass and steel building in the shape of a half-rolled carpet, with the patterns printed on the façade, opened in 2014 to house the largest carpet collection in the country. Inside the Carpet Museum are some 14,000 pieces, carpets, flat-weaves, camel bags, saddlebags and costumes, of which a few hundred are on show, arranged so that in two hours you learn to tell a Quba carpet from a Karabakh one, which in the bazaar is worth money. This guide tells where the collection comes from, how to walk the three floors, what each school and technique is, where to watch the weavers and what to do afterwards.

The collection and the building

The museum was founded in 1967 by Latif Karimov, the weaver, painter and scholar who classified the carpets of Azerbaijan and wrote the book still in use, and it opened in the Juma mosque of the Old City, then in the former Lenin museum, and in 2014 in this building on the promenade, the work of the Austrian architect Franz Janz, who gave it the shape of a rolled carpet for the fun of it and because it can be seen from the sea. There are three floors rising in a spiral: the first, the flat-weaves and objects, the second, the pile carpets by school and century, and the third, the 20th century, with the Soviet portrait carpets and the pieces of today's designers. The art of Azerbaijani carpet weaving has been on UNESCO's intangible heritage list since 2010, and the museum is the institution that looks after it.

How to read an Azerbaijani carpet

The first thing the museum teaches is that not everything is a pile carpet: shepherds and nomads wove flat, without knots, and from that come the kilim, the sumakh, with its wrapped weft and dense pattern, the zili, the verni with its stylised dragons and the shadda with rows of camels, which are on the first floor and are the oldest and the cheapest to buy afterwards. The pile carpets divide into seven schools, following Karimov's classification: Quba, with medallions and fine borders in dark blues and reds; Baku, from the villages of Absheron, with a dark blue ground and star motifs; Shirvan, with small geometric patterns; Ganja and Kazakh, shepherds' carpets with large motifs, few colours and thick wool; Karabakh, with flowers and big medallions on red, the best known; and Tabriz, the finest, with central-medallion and pictorial carpets, from the tradition of the city now in Iran. Each case has a panel with the school, the village, the century and the knot count, and in one room there is a loom where a weaver knots in view of the public and explains what she is doing.

What not to miss

On the second floor, the 17th and 18th-century fragments, with the colours of pomegranate, walnut and cochineal dyes; the dragon carpets of Karabakh, with the animal turned into a pattern you have to hunt for; the prayer rugs with the niche, from Shirvan; and on the third, the carpets with portraits of Lenin and Stalin and with tractors, which weavers made in the 1930s with the same technique as ever, and Karimov's pieces. On the ground floor the shop sells certified carpets and books, and there is a weaving workshop for groups, by reservation, where you knot a few centimetres of carpet and understand why a good one costs what it does.

How to visit and what to do afterwards

It is on the seafront, the Bulvar, next to the park, ten minutes on foot from Icherisheher metro and the Old City and fifteen from Sahil; it opens Tuesday to Sunday in the daytime, closes on Mondays, and charges an ordinary entry fee, with an audio guide in several languages worth taking. Two hours are enough. Afterwards, with what you have learned, the Yashil Bazaar is the place to buy a kilim or a saddlebag at market prices, and in the Old City Ali Shamsi's studio and the carpet shops in the lane by the Maiden Tower, where you now know what you are looking at.

Frequently asked questions