About Ghomrug

What Ghomrug is for

Ghomrug is a multilingual reference work on the Persian carpet. Its focus is on the silk carpets of Qom (Ghom). The journal also covers history, weaving centres, nomadic weaving, designs, technique, authenticity, care and collecting.

Our benchmarks are museum descriptions, the Encyclopaedia Iranica and the catalogue texts of the major auction houses: factual, documented and cautiously worded where research is uncertain.

Sources

• Every statement of fact is supported by a source that we have consulted and read ourselves.
• We draw on museum collections and their scholarly texts, the Encyclopaedia Iranica, UNESCO, the specialist literature, academic papers and auction catalogues.
• We use Wikipedia only as a supplement, never as the sole source for an important statement.
• Statements by dealers are expressly labelled as trade claims.
• Quotations are short, set in quotation marks and name their source.

When sources contradict each other

Many attributions and dates in carpet research are disputed. Where that is the case, we set out the positions side by side in a separate box, “The sources disagree”, with a link to each source and the reason why the question matters. We word things as museums do: “attributed to”, “probably”, “circa 1920”.

Artificial intelligence and translation

The articles are researched and written by Hassan Farahani with the support of AI tools. The tools help with searching, organising and wording; every fact is checked against the linked source. German is the source language. The English, Persian, French and Italian versions are machine-translated and then editorially reviewed.

Updates and corrections

Every article states its date of publication and when it was last updated. We change the date only when we have revised the content of an article. If you find an error, please write to us at [email protected].

Images

We show only images whose licence permits their use, such as public-domain museum images or images under open licences, and for every image we name the creator, collection and licence. Images are stored on our own server.

Who is behind it

The publisher is Luxonaria GmbH in Vienna. Its managing director is Hassan Farahani, the author of all articles.

Luxonaria GmbH also operates the online carpet shops Teppichbazar and BazarPort. Ghomrug itself sells nothing, gives no shop prices and does not encourage purchases. At most, some articles end with a link to suitable examples in one of these shops. This link is always labelled as a link to a company of Luxonaria GmbH.

Ghomrug content is not reused in the shops, and shop texts do not appear on Ghomrug.