Isfahan, Iran, November 6, 2006--Five years after the 9/11 attacks, Iran's carpet sellers are still trying to recover from the effects that day and its aftermath has had on the country's tourist industry.
On the first day after Eid, sellers nestled in the stalls surrounding Isfahan's fabled and massive Imam square made just a few sales.
One seller parted ways with a Torkoman, with its characteristic geometric patterns set against a blood-red background.
Another handed over to an eager Frenchman a beige-colored silk and wool piece from Na'in, a famous carpet weaving region in Iran.
But overall, business was tepid for one of Iran's most important centres for the carpet industry. The other nomadic and city-produced pieces folded into neat stacks and hung on the walls in the many carpet shops would have to wait another day.
The problem, say the sellers, are the lack of tourists. Esmail Sasisi, at 28 already a 15-year veteran of the Isfahan carpet trade, remembers a time before 9/11 when the tens of thousands of tourists traversed Imam Khomeini Square in a single day.
Today, supposedly the tourist high-season, he counted just a few dozen tourists from Europe and Japan.
Abed Rezayi, Sasisi's business partner at Caravan Carpet, said travelers stopped coming to Iran after 9/11 and the threat of terrorism around the world increased.
"Iran was branded a terrorist country, and people began having negative ideas us," he said.
The tourism-dependent carpet trade was then buffeted by successive wars in neighbouring Afghanistan and Iraq, and most recently unease over the country's controversial nuclear programme.
Nowadays, Rezayi says the high-season is "anytime when there are no problems in the Middle East."
Saeed Mesbah of Aladdin Carpet and Kilim Export remembers a time when every month a few tour buses full of two dozen tourists descended on his store. Now, he only sees a half-empty bus just every four to six months.
The low tourist numbers have translated into a 75 per cent drop for his business over the past few years. While he would have taken home a very modest 150 million rials ($16,200) for his share in the store he co-owns with two others, he now earns a third of that.
Traders now rely more on the export market, but that has suffered too, as world tastes change and competition from inexpensive, mass-produced pieces from India, Pakistan and China continues.
Export carpet sales have dropped 21 per cent in the last five years, from $620 million in 2001 to $490 million in 2005, according to the Central Bank of Iran. This year, the Iranian Carpet Exporter's Association predicts another 8 to 10 per cent drop.
