Azerbaijan
Hello, I'm Narmin
Hasanova
I am a kelaghayi artisan, fourth generation. This technique is UNESCO heritage, and it is my inheritance. Silk is not a choice for me — it is the only material this tradition has ever known.
A fourth-generation kelaghayi artisan from Shaki, Narmin Hasanova is one of the last masters of Azerbaijan's UNESCO-recognized silk dyeing tradition. She learned the art of block-stamping silk with paraffin resist from her father, who learned from his father before him. Her work is the living preservation of a cultural memory inscribed on the UNESCO Intangible Heritage list in 2014.
People come here and ask me to explain the technique. I show them the galib, the paraffin, the dye bath. They watch me press the stamp. They say: is that all? It is not all. It is thirty years. My father pressed his first galib at the age of seven. His father pressed his first galib at the age of seven. I pressed mine at the age of seven. My daughter pressed hers last year. She is nine now — she started late, we worried about her. What I cannot explain is what happens in the moment of contact — stamp to silk. There is a second before you press where you know, from the weight of your arm and the give of the fabric, whether the impression will be right. You cannot learn that from a video. You cannot learn it from a book. You learn it from ten thousand wrong impressions, and then one morning you wake up and you know. The artists who send me their patterns — they have seen something true in their own tradition. I see it in the lines. My job is to carry that truth into silk without losing it. That is what five hundred years of kelaghayi has taught us to do.
— Narmin Hasanova, Shaki, Azerbaijan
The motif
Buta — the eternal flame
Shaki, Azerbaijan · kelaghayi · 500 years
Dyed by hand in Shaki, Azerbaijan
Collections by Narmin Hasanova
The Shaki Silk Collection
Kelaghayi block-stamp dyeing · 30 pieces
30 pieces
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