Region · 4 min read

Naryn: two rugs in one

Cut two layers of felt into mirror images and stitch them back together — and you have made a positive and a negative at once.

At two thousand metres in the Kyrgyz Tian Shan, wool is the only material there has ever been in abundance. Shyrdak is what the women of Naryn made of it: a felt carpet so dense and so durable that a good one outlives the yurt it was made for.

The technique is a kind of inlay. Two sheets of felt in contrasting colours are laid together and cut in one movement along a chalked pattern — the ram's horn, the running dog, the sun. The pieces are swapped and stitched so that every rug has a twin somewhere, its exact inverse.

UNESCO listed the craft as intangible heritage in 2012. The Shyrdak Collective brings forty women together to make it pay.