These are not the knotted Mamluk carpets that Cairo’s looms sold to a pope in 1489. Kilim is flat-woven, with the colour carried in the weft and no pile to cut. In Egypt its town is Fuwwah, on the Rosetta branch of the Nile. In 2019 one of the town’s workshop businesses put a piece at about a week and a kilo of sheep’s wool, and said its craftsmen had fallen from about two thousand to two hundred in the early 2000s as machine-made rugs took the market.
Fuwwah was once a place of consequence: the medieval geographer al-Dimashqi compared it to Cairo, and Muhammad Ali had a fez factory built there in 1824. A day at a loom here is time with a craft that has nearly stopped once already, and whose future depends on the next rug being bought, not admired.
A rug bought in Fuwwah pays the town that makes it, and its weavers lost most of their trade to machine-made rugs.
How it could run
A proposed shape, confirmed with you when it is arranged.
- Drive north into the Delta to Fuwwah, on the Rosetta branch.
- Watch a kilim on the loom: the warp, the weft, and how a colour change is made.
- Weave a few rows yourself.
- Walk by the river through the old town before leaving.
