Setting
Tehran rises against the southern face of the Alborz, spreading from the old bazaar quarter in the south to the mountain suburbs in the north.
Why this place matters for craft
Tehran is a market and museum city rather than a workshop centre: the Grand Bazaar's carpet halls handle national and export trade, and institutions such as the Carpet Museum and the Glassware and Ceramics Museum hold reference collections. Dealer attributions here cover the whole country and vary in reliability.
Quarters, bazaars and workshops
| Area | What is there |
|---|---|
| Grand Bazaar carpet halls | Wholesale rug trade; entry is straightforward but the scale is large. |
| Museum quarter | National collections useful for calibrating the eye before buying. |
| Northern galleries | Contemporary craft and design retail at higher prices. |
What to look for on an object
- Any craft type — Compare a bazaar piece with a museum example of the same type before deciding what the workmanship is worth.
These notes are for learning to look, not for authentication. No description here certifies an object, its age or its origin.
Practical notes
- Seeing the museum collections first makes the bazaar far easier to read.
- Export paperwork for carpets and antiques is a real constraint; ask the seller what documentation exists.
- Workshop addresses, bazaar hours and market days change; confirm locally before travelling.
Season: Spring and autumn; summer is hot and hazy.
Used in these crafts
A hand-knotted pile textile woven across Iran in city workshops, village looms and pastoral camps, distinguished by regional structure, palette and design vocabulary.
The workshop carpet tradition of Tabriz in East Azerbaijan, characterised by drawn cartoons, a distinctive hook-knife weaving method and a wide range of fineness grades.
A Persian inlay art in which fine rods of wood, bone and metal are bundled into star units, sliced into thin sheets and applied to a wooden surface to form dense geometric tessellation.
The Iranian tradition of decorating copper, brass and silver vessels with small chisels struck by hammer, working the metal into line, ground and relief.
A decorative technique in which powdered coloured glass is fused by heat onto the surface of gold, silver or copper objects, producing a smooth, glossy coloured surface, historically practised in Isfahan on vessels, jewellery and decorative panels.
Iranian jewellery ranges from gold and gem-set court ornaments to silver tribal adornment, often combining enamel, turquoise, pearls and coloured stones.
Iranian glass includes Sasanian cut glass, early Islamic mould-blown and cut vessels, and later blown bottles and rosewater sprinklers, with a small studio glassblowing tradition today.
A patterned Iranian brocade woven with supplementary wefts, historically in silk and wool, associated above all with Yazd and Kerman.