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Carpets
Magnificent samples of Iranian, Turkmen, Afghani and Caucasian carpets are kept in the museum. Their shapes and sizes are as diverse as their purpose. Carpets are favourite articles of use in the East. They cover floors and hang on walls of dwellings. They protect from colds and please an eye at the same time. Yurts walls of nomadic peoples are covered with carpets, a carpet serves as a canopy, closing an entrance, and it can be a coverlet, a horse-cloth or an adornment for a camel. Saddlebags are also made of carpets, the table is laid on a carpet, and prayer to Allah that is accomplished five times a day by an orthodox Mussulman needs a special prayer rug. Even perennial human aspiration to rise above ground took the form of a plane-carpet.
A carpet is a universal article and at the same time it is work of art, that is always unique. Though colour and pattern of a carpet depends on tribe or kin, where it is made, a manual work is executed on memory, and there are no two ones, which are absolute identical. Connoisseurs name carpets "Music for eyes". Marko Polo, a famous traveler, admired the Central Asian carpets; they were represented in the pictures of Italian Renaissance artists and Dutch painters of the 17th century. The experts assert that beauty of a carpet grows as the years go by because it gets a silken film of grey that gives special charm to it.
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