10'1" x 13' Persian Heriz Sherabian Rug | Geometric Star Medallion | 1980s Wool, Excellent Condition

This is a village weaving from the Heriz district in the classic Sherabian manner, knotted in the 1980s on a cotton foundation with heavy, springy local wool. The pile is full and even across all 10'1" x 13' of it, the sides and both fringed ends are original, and the back photograph shows a clean, tight, regular knot line with no repairs or reweaves. Rugs of this format are the workhorses of the Heriz tradition: big enough to hold a full seating group or a 10 chair dining table, tough enough to take decades of that traffic, and drawn boldly enough to read from across a large room. Every rug we ship carries our certificate of authenticity documenting origin, age, materials and construction.

Design and Motifs

The field is organized around a large navy 8 point star medallion with an ivory heart and a small stepped square at the exact center, framed by a camel outline that lifts the whole figure off the red ground. Long pendant palmettes drop from the top and bottom of the medallion, each one built from hooked leaves and a heart shaped cartouche in navy and rose. Four ivory corner spandrels carry their own angular vinework and small rosettes, and the open red ground between them is filled with serrated leaves, curled hooks, blossoms and tiny animal-like flourishes typical of this classic geometric Persian rug design. The wide navy main border alternates large 8 petal rosettes with arrowhead and serrated leaf panels in red, camel and ivory, and is held between camel guard stripes of running vine. Everything is drawn in straight lines and clean angles, the signature of a village cartoon rather than a curvilinear city workshop.

A Deep Burgundy Field With Navy, Olive and Ivory

The ground is a rustic burgundy that shifts gently between brick and a deeper wine tone as the abrash moves across the width, exactly what you want to see from natural dye lots in handspun village wool. Against it the medallion, the border and the outlines of every leaf are a very dark indigo navy, almost black where the pile falls away from the light, with brighter mid blue and a clear sky blue used for small flower centers. Olive green appears in restrained touches in the spandrel vines and inside the border rosettes, cooling the red without competing with it. Ivory does the structural work: it fills the four corners, cores the central medallion and picks out the petals of the border rosettes. Warm camel and soft rose pink fill the middle range, so the rug reads rich and saturated from a distance and reveals a surprising amount of color variety up close.

Heriz and the Sherabian Weave

Heriz is a cluster of villages east of Tabriz on the slopes below Mount Sabalan, where mineral rich water and mountain pasture produce wool with a famously high lanolin content that resists abrasion and takes dye with real depth. Sherabian belongs to that group and is known among dealers for slightly tighter, better resolved drawing than the coarser village output, which shows here in the crisp outlining of the medallion points and the even spacing of the border rosettes. The knotting is Turkish, beaten down hard over a stout cotton warp and weft, giving the thick, heavy handle you can see in the rolled and folded photographs. Heriz weaving is generally under 200 knots per square inch by design, because the strength of this tradition is not fineness but structure: a rug built to be walked on for generations and to look better as the wool polishes with use.