A magic carpet experience on a weekend break to Baku

A trip to the capital of Azerbaijan allowed Geordie Greig to take in one of the Silk Road’s most colourful festivals

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The clinching argument for a long weekend to Baku, Azerbaijan's ancient capital on the Silk Road, was that for one weekend only, almost all the streets in the medieval Old Town would be covered by hand-woven carpets. There would be hundreds of them, laid head-to-head in a magical mosaic of colour and artful designs.

I also fancifully conjectured that Shakespeare might have been considering the festival when, in The Tempest, he poetically extemporised how "the earth's a carpet laid before the sun".

Well, Baku certainly took his word literally. The capital was transformed into a giant installation of colourful knots, threads and weaves covering its cobbled streets. Dealers, weavers, stitchers, collectors and historians gathered from 19 nations to debate and celebrate this ancient artistry, as some carpets, we learnt, were first woven more than 2,000 years ago.

It was an academic forum alongside a place for thousands of visitors to enjoy the festival's dramatic street theatre, surreally coinciding with the Baku marathon, the country's first international race with the full 26-mile course. One artist painted serene faces onto rugs on an easel, next to a pop-up children's football pitch entirely composed of rugs. Earlier in the day, experts from Japan and Nepal pitched arguments about the carpet's role in aiding the GDP of their countries as well as defining their national identity.