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People in Garabagh traditionally used to produce carpets for their own needs. Carpets placed on floor and walls helped to protect dwellings from a winter froze. Due to specifics of local sheep breeds, their wool is good for weaving of carpets with thick, long and fluffy pile.

People in Garabagh used to live in big, oblong rooms; thus carpets manufactured for these rooms also are big in size and oblong by form. They used to produce carpets in sets named in Azeri "dast". One set includes a long and wide main carpet "khali" (for the middle of the room), two narrow carpets "kanare" (for placing aside to "khali") and one small carpet "kaleyi" or "bashlyk" (for covering the rest of the long floor in the room).

Garabagh carpets are known for their cheerful and bright colors. Color gamma of these products is based on broad variety of natural (vegetative) paints. Amazing gamma of color combinations along with geometrical forms of vegetative motives bring to these carpets a special identity, that allows to unite them into a separate type of "the Garabagh carpets".

The fragment of "Malibayli" carpet

Garabagh type of carpets is divided into two groups: of lowlands and highlands. The last one often is called "the Shusha carpet group", as at highland part of the area Shusha was a leader. Besides, villages like Dashbulagh, Malibayli, Gubatli and others located at highland Garabagh also were known as carpet weavers. At lowlands carpet manufacturing was based in large settlement "nests": Jabrayil (is known as a special group), Goradiz, Barda etc.

Garabagh carpets present 33 composition variations. Some of them are local versions of the carpet styles from Tabriz and Iran, while others are completely original. The most interesting among them is a "Qasimushaghi" composition with plenty of skillfully arranged elements.

Middle field of this carpet composition is completely filled with different decorative motives. Their shape, color and creative idea carefully combine these elements with each other. Each of them is subordinated to the general ornamental image of the carpet.

The central medallion is designed as a cross-reminiscent figure with its sides touching the border. It is surrounded with ornamental edging of small flower shapes. The medallion's inside is decorated with a "spider" and this element almost completely fills the medallion. Hooky legs of this "spider" are white, while under them you can see other legs of black or dark blue yarn. White body of the "spider" is decorated with an ornament created from various elements of dark blue and red wool. Main pair of legs - claws - "have caught" vertical sides of the medallion. They are white - in a color harmony with the body of the "spider".

The carpet border presents artistically developed vegetative motives. Even corners between "spider" legs and the border contain ornamental details such as small "shovel", bordered outside with "mice teeth". The middle field has a velvet-looking background colored from dark blue to black, and this is very advantageous under big bright elements. Besides, numerous claret and red elements give the carpet very cheerful color appearance.

A "Lampa" carpet

The "Malibeyli" carpets are interesting basically for ornaments in their central part. Several medallions, placed at a vertical axis of this narrow carpet, are surrounded with slightly visible graded strip. Center of a medallion is occupied by a square containing snake-looking geometrical figures. Outside of the square in the rest of the medallion area there are symmetrically placed "cloud" motives, known from the decoration art of China, India, Iran and other countries. Clouds are either white with red on the dark blue background, or red with blue on the cyan background - mixed, placed one aside to another. Areas between clouds are filled with stylized images of an indefinite shape. The dominant colors are red-and-blue tones. Medallions and "clouds" are contoured with a double-line: black line alongside to white. Garabagh is famous for its pileless carpets: shadda, zili, verni, kilim and palas products. High artistic taste is typical also for Garabagh jejims from the Lambaran village. Jejim is a valuable product of applied arts. Local people manufacture them at a horizontal loom like carpet weavers of Turkmenia have in use, but much more narrow. Fabric stripes are sewed alongside to each other till the necessary width. So artists receive gentle, silky fabric of amazing, harmonious color ranges.

It is a wonderful decoration material for house interiors. Jejims were used in Garabagh for producing of pillows and pillowcases, tablecloths, curtains, coverlets.

The charm of jejims appears from combination of ornamental colorful stripes, decorated with heavy and light dotted lines, where dots are shaped as circles, squares, triangles etc. Using limited sources, expert craftsmen (basically women) brilliantly managed to create patterns in jejim, achieving in their artistic products both brightness and delicacy.

Shadda and verni are not less attractive with specific beauty of their decorative features. They show great variety of compositions. Ornamental shadda basically presents stylized images of "bees", "cockerels" and "cypresses". Composition this small carpet traditionally presents combination of three wide horizontal stripes with white one in the middle.

Verni carpets are big in size. Frequent repetition of "ducks" and "S" shaped elements is typical for these carpets. Combination of white, cyan and blue is specific feature of verni carpets.

Besides mentioned above carpets, they also use to produce in Garabagh other carpet products, such as khurjun (a doubled bag), mafrash (a trunk), chuval (a sack), horse-cloth etc.