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Teresia Sampsonia Teresia was born in 1589 into a noble Orthodox Christian (Greek or Georgian Orthodoxy) Circassian family in the Safavid Empire, ruled at the time by king (shah) Abbas the Great. She was named Sampsonia by birth. The daughter of Ismail Khan, a brother-in-law of the king, she grew up in Isfahan in the Iranian royal court as an accomplished horsewoman who enjoyed embroidery and painting. On 2 February 1608, with the approval of her aunt and Abbas, Teresia married Robert Shirley in Iran. Shirley was an English adventurer who was sent to the Safavids after a Persian embassy...

Most rug weaving happens in villages - small workshops, farm houses - in agricultural settings. Yarns are dirty to begin with; un-rinsed dye, seeds, burrs, dirt from the floor. Just taken from the loom a newly woven rug is filthy. The backs are fuzzy. The fronts so shaggy you can barely see the design. A producer friend used to say that the rug on the loom had the DNA - materials, dye, design - but that the final result was about the finishing. Like cutting a diamond. Turns out you can weave rugs with the same 'DNA', finish them differently,...

THROWBACK TUESDAY: THE MOORS, SPAIN AND HER SHEEPIt is 30 April 711 and the Berber commander, Tariq Ibn-Ziyad, and his small force of soldiers had just landed in Gibraltar when the commander issued a startling command: “Burn all our ships”! His troops, shocked and puzzled, wanted to know how they would return home if all the ships were burnt upon which Tariq Ibn-Ziyad issued even a more shocking command: “We are not going home. THIS is our new home”, and thus began the invasion of the Umayyad invasion into Spain. What followed for the next 800 years would be a...

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20160817-the-last-nomads-of-iran?ocid=ww.social.link.email

Long, long ago a gentleman from a faraway land, with the knowledge of weaving carpets, immigrated to Persia. When he saw Kashan he fell in love with the city and its people. Although the Kashani weavers made beautiful carpets, he decided to set up a factory to make new carpets with new designs that have never been woven in Kashan before. In the beginning there was some resistance to his business from competitors in Kashan and they were mocking him and laughing at his designs but his perseverance and passion paved the way for his success in such a way...