11'6" x 16'8" Persian Tabriz Rug | Wool & Silk Mahi Fish Design | Oversize Layered Medallion

This is a full palace-scale Tabriz, 11'6" x 16'8" of hand-knotted wool with silk worked through the drawing, and it is the kind of piece a workshop commits a loom to for years rather than months. The field carries the classic Mahi fish pattern in a near black ground, broken open in the center by a layered medallion that steps outward in ivory, green gold and soft rust. The silk sits exactly where it should, on the outlines and the scalloped edges, so the medallion catches light from one direction and settles back into the field from the other. At this scale the rug covers a full great room or a long formal dining table with generous chair pull-back, and it is one of the more usable pieces in our oversize Persian rugs group because the pattern is dense enough to read well even when furniture sits on it. It ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The field is drawn in the Mahi, or Herati fish, repeat: a small diamond lattice with a rosette at each intersection and 4 curved lanceolate leaves turned around it, the leaves being the fish that give the pattern its name. Across nearly 17 feet that repeat never wanders, which is the first thing to look at on a rug this size. The medallion is built in concentric scalloped rings, 8 of them counting outward from the ivory and rust core, each ring outlined in silk so the profile reads like carved relief. A slender pendant drops from the top and bottom of the medallion, and the 4 corner spandrels repeat the same scalloped drawing in a lighter key, leaving open sections of pale lattice against the dark ground. The main border runs a chain of ivory and rust palmettes with rosettes linked by green gold vine scrolls, flanked by multiple narrow guard stripes, one of them a fine barber-pole stripe that frames the whole rug cleanly.

Color: Black Ground with Rust, Green Gold and Ivory

The ground is black, reading warm and almost coffee brown under lamplight and cooling back toward true black in daylight, which is why the same rug looks different in the overall and close-up photographs. Against that ground the fish pattern is picked out in ivory, rust and a muted green gold, so the field never turns flat or heavy. The medallion moves through its rings in graded tones: a deep rust and ivory center, then honey and green gold, then pale ivory and silver-tinted outlines where the silk sits. Rust is the accent that ties everything together, appearing in the flower heads of the border, the corner spandrels and the pendant finials. The outer border is the darkest note in the rug, nearly black, with ivory palmettes and small touches of red, terracotta and green that keep the frame lively. The palette is warm and dark overall, and it works particularly well over wood floors and against ivory, cream or camel upholstery.

Tabriz and the Weaving of This Piece

Tabriz sits in the northwest of Persia and has been the country's most organized weaving city for centuries, with a workshop tradition that measures fineness in Raj, the count of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 inches. The Mahi design is the city's signature, and it is also its hardest test: a fine repeating lattice over a very large field punishes any loss of tension or any drift in the drawing. Here the lattice stays square from selvage to selvage, the medallion sits centered, and the scalloped rings close correctly at every quarter. The cotton foundation gives the rug the flat, stable lie that Tabriz looms are known for, while the wool and silk pile is clipped low so the fine detail survives. Quality this consistent across 11'6" x 16'8" is workshop work, not village work, and it is the reason a well-woven Tabriz of this scale holds its value in a way that machine-made room-size pieces never do.