Photo: bultannews.com
“This giant carpet is woven with soil on the body of the mythical great fish that sails through various seas and oceans to take the message of peace and friendship from the Iranian people to people of different colours, races and faiths all over the world.”
This carpet is 1,600 square meters in size, and is made by local artists with the help of some artists from all over Iran, and it contains eighty different colours and shades, with a message of “global peace”. The design of the carpet is inspired by local myths of Hormozgan province about a very large fish called “Damahi” that lived in the waters of the Persian Gulf and at times of need came to the assistance of the people of the region. Different patterns of the carpet are also based on the four elements, water, wind, soil and fire, which are represented in the four corners of the carpet.
This giant carpet is woven with soil on the body of the mythical great fish that sails through various seas and oceans to take the message of peace and friendship from the Iranian people to people of different colours, races and faiths all over the world.
Hormoz [also spelled Hormuz] Island is an Iranian island near the strategic Strait of Hormoz in the Persian Gulf, and is part of Iranian Hormozgan Province. This island has a long history and was known by the Greeks as Organa, a corruption of the word Hormoz. The Portuguese explorer Alfonso de Albuquerque captured the island in 1507 and built a fortress on it, but it was recaptured by a combined Anglo-Iranian force in 1622.
The island is covered by sedimentary rock and layers of volcanic material, thus producing a multi-coloured soil, locally known as “seventy-colour island”. Local artists are fond of producing soil carpets making use of different colours. This is the fifth carpet created in Hormoz Island and is the largest soil carpet anywhere in the world.
For the above I am most grateful to Prof. Farhang Jahanpour, former Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Languages at the University of Isfahan, a former Senior Fulbright Research Scholar at Harvard, and former Editor, Middle East and North Africa, the BBC. For the past 28 years he has taught at the Department of Continuing Education at the University of Oxford and is a member of Kellogg College.
See the original article in Persian that Prof. Jahanpour has translated into English:
آلبوم عکس: فرش خاکی هرمز؛ پیام 'صلح برای جهانیان'
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