T he clinching argument for a long weekend to Baku , Azerbaijan ’s ancient capital on the Silk Road , was that for one weekend only almost all the streets in the medieval Old Town would be covered by hand-woven carpets. There would be hundreds of them, laid head-to-head in a magical mosaic of colour and artful designs.

I also fancifully conjectured that Shakespeare might have been considering the festival when, in The Tempest, he poetically extemporised how “the earth’s a carpet laid before the sun”. Well, Baku certainly took his word literally. The capital was transformed into a giant installation of colourful knots, threads and weaves covering its cobbled streets.…