10' x 14' Afghan Bokhara Rug | Black Field Turkoman Guls | Hand-Knotted Wool, Brand New

A true room-size Bokhara in the hardest color to weave well: black. This 10' x 14' piece is hand-knotted in 100% wool on a cotton foundation, with a deep ink-black ground carrying eleven columns of octagonal Turkoman guls and finished with a wide, multi-band tribal border. It has never been on a floor, and the pile still has the full height and dry, slightly waxy handle of highland wool that has not yet been walked on. Buyers looking at 10 x 14 rugs usually need one piece to carry an entire great room, and the disciplined repeat here does that without competing with furniture. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming it is a genuine hand-knotted Oriental rug, not a machine-made reproduction.

Design and Motifs

The field is a strict grid of elephant foot guls, the flattened octagons that identify the Bokhara family, each one quartered into four compartments and filled with small hooked and stepped devices. Between the rows sit slim cruciform flowers with arrowhead tips, which keep the black ground from reading as empty space and give the eye a second rhythm to follow. The drawing is entirely straight-line work, so this is geometric weaving in the purest sense, with no curved vine anywhere in the pattern. Around the field runs a layered border system: narrow guard stripes of latch-hook and checkerboard, a main band of starburst rosettes set in framed panels, and an outer band of large stepped diamonds and hooked bars that reads almost like flatweave drawing. It is an all-over composition with no central medallion, which is exactly why a rug this size stays calm under a large seating group.

Color: Black Ground With Rust, Camel and Ivory

The ground is a genuine black, dense and matte, with the faint charcoal shift that hand-dyed wool always shows when the light crosses the pile at an angle. Against it the guls are outlined in dark burgundy and filled with camel brown, warm terracotta rust and a muted salmon red, each motif finished with small ivory hooks that make the octagons pop off the dark field. Tiny touches of soft light blue appear inside the gul centers and again in the border rosettes, and that cool note is what keeps the palette from going flat brown. The borders shift warmer than the field, running burgundy, brick red, gold-brown and cream, so the rug frames itself in a band of warmth. The cotton fringe at both ends is a clean natural ivory. In practice this is a dark, grounding rug that reads charcoal and rust in daylight and almost black-and-copper under lamplight, which makes it easy to live with alongside navy, leather, walnut and brass.

Afghan Weaving and the Bokhara Tradition

Bokhara takes its name from the old Central Asian market city where Turkoman weavings were traded, and the gul repeat belongs to the Turkoman tribes whose descendants weave across northern Afghanistan today. The wool from that region is long-stapled and high in lanolin, which is why tribal rugs from these looms wear so slowly and keep their sheen for decades. Weaving a 10 foot width means the loom is set once and the same weavers stay on it for the better part of a year, and the discipline shows: the gul columns track straight from end to end, the row spacing holds, and the borders turn the 4 corners cleanly instead of running out of pattern. The pile is clipped short and even, the back is tight, and the selvages are firm. This is workshop-grade Afghan weaving in a size that is genuinely hard to find in a black ground.