10'5" x 13'8" Persian Bakhtiar Rug | Tribal Star Medallion | 1980s Wool, Excellent Condition

This is a big, confident village piece from the 1980s: a room-filling Persian Bakhtiar woven entirely by hand in wool on a cotton foundation, with a 3/8" pile that still stands up thick and even across all 4 corners. The drawing is pure tribal weaver logic, a huge 8 lobed ivory star medallion floating on a deep red ground, drawn with the slight asymmetries and hand-mixed color that separate a real mountain weave from a factory copy. At 10'5" x 13'8" it sits squarely in the most useful of the large formats, and buyers browsing 10x14 Persian rugs will find very few older Bakhtiars at this scale in this condition. The pile shows no bare spots, the ends and sides are intact, and the colors have that mellow, slightly deepened tone that only comes from 40 years of settling. Every rug we ship carries a certificate of authenticity documenting its origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The center is a broad 8 lobed star medallion outlined in ivory, each lobe packed with its own little garden of checkerboard rosettes, pink blossoms, dark green leaf sprays and tiny stepped crosses. At the core sits a 4 petal rosette in green and blue set inside a burgundy cross, the kind of small hand-drawn anchor point that keeps a design this busy from losing its center. Long ivory pendants run off the top and bottom of the medallion into serrated leaf palmettes, and the corner spandrels answer them in deep indigo, each one filled with vases, flowering shrubs and angular vine work. The field between is dense with boteh, cypress leaves, birds and blossom clusters, drawn in the slightly angular hand that defines the best Persian tribal rugs. The main border is the classic Bakhtiar flowering tree band: alternating cypress trees, rose bushes and stylized weeping willows on a burgundy ground, flanked by narrow rosette guard stripes.

A Study in Burgundy, Indigo and Ivory

The dominant reading is red: a deep crimson to burgundy field that shifts between raspberry and oxblood depending on where the light falls, with the main border settling into the darker wine end of that range. Against it the weaver has set two blues, a near-black indigo in the spandrels and a brighter peacock teal that flickers through the field flowers and the ground around the medallion. The ivory of the medallion is the real event, a warm buttery cream rather than a cold white, and it lifts the whole center of the rug the moment the piece is unrolled. Around those three anchors run the supporting colors: bottle green in the leaves and cypress trees, soft rose and salmon pink in the blossoms, camel and gold in the vine tracery, and small hits of chocolate brown and black outlining. Low-angle photos read warmer and richer, overhead photos read cooler and bluer, and both are honest views of the same wool.

Bakhtiar Weaving in the Zagros Foothills

Bakhtiar rugs come from the Chahar Mahal district southwest of Isfahan, woven in settled villages such as Shalamzar, Saman and Chalshotor by families tied to the Bakhtiari tribal confederation of the Zagros mountains. Those flocks graze at high altitude, and the wool they give is heavy, springy and high in lanolin, which is why a 40 year old Bakhtiar like this one still has body underfoot instead of feeling tired. The weave is a symmetrical Turkish knot on a cotton warp and weft, beaten down hard, producing a rug built for real traffic rather than for a display case. Village work of this type is not chasing the fine knot counts of a city workshop; the value sits in the wool quality, the strength of the drawing and the natural-looking dye palette. A piece at 10'5" x 13'8" would have taken a large loom and well over a year of steady work, which is exactly why oversized older Bakhtiars in excellent condition have become harder to source each season.