Berrin Torolsan

2 weeks ago | worldofinteriors.com | Berrin Torolsan

When, in 1949, the Soviet ethnographer Sergei Rudenko found the famous Pazyryk carpet scrunched up in ‘a ball of ice’ in a Siberian burial chamber, the prehistory of pastoral Central Asia and its Altaic peoples changed for ever, and the golden age leapt back a millennium. Now preserved in the Hermitage, this Iron Age saddle blanket casts a brilliant shaft of light on the ‘Janus-like Scythians, at once dark and glittering, nomadic and yet deeply connected to... the steppe’.