12'6" x 21'2" Antique Armenian Soltanabad Rug | All-Over Palmette Lattice | 1930s, Excellent Condition

This is a genuine palace-scale piece from the 1930s, hand-knotted in Armenia in the Soltanabad idiom and measuring a full 12'6" x 21'2". Rugs at this length were made for long halls and grand reception rooms, and very few of them come through in this state: the pile is even from end to end, the ivory fringe is intact, and the drawing has not been softened by decades of traffic. The wool is glossy and hand-spun, which is why the burgundy ground still shifts between wine and raspberry as you walk around it. It is one of the very few genuinely usable oversized rugs of this vintage, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming age, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

There is no central medallion here. The weaver ran a continuous all-over design the entire 21'2" length, built from interlocking cusped panels that trap large teal and navy palmettes, 8 petal rosettes and ivory blossom sprays. The connective tissue is a heavy saffron yellow vine that outlines every compartment, so the pattern reads as a lattice from across the room and as individual flower heads up close. Serrated navy leaves anchor the corners of each repeat, and small white florets are scattered through the ground in groups of 3 to keep the burgundy from ever looking empty. The main border carries broad navy cartouches filled with gold palmettes and rose-pink leaf forms, separated by turquoise guard stripes, and a narrow pure yellow inner band snaps the field away from the border. It is a confident, large-scale drawing, exactly the kind of repeat that holds up when a rug has to cover this much floor.

A Burgundy, Navy and Gold Palette

The field is a deep raspberry burgundy that carries a cochineal-like warmth, and it abrades into a slightly lighter wine tone where the pile catches the light. Against it the weaver set 2 distinct blues: a dark indigo navy used for the compartment outlines, the serrated leaves and the main border ground, and a bright peacock teal reserved for the rosette centers and the larger flower heads. Saffron and mustard yellow do the structural work, tracing every vine and forming the thin inner band, and the effect is much closer to old gold than to lemon. Supporting tones include a soft olive green in the leafwork, dusty rose pink in the border palmettes, cream ivory in the small florets, and touches of burnt orange at the flower cores. The ivory fringe and pale kilim ends frame the whole thing cleanly. It is a saturated, jewel-toned palette that reads rich rather than busy, and it sits comfortably with dark wood, brass and warm plaster walls.

Woven in Armenia in the Soltanabad Tradition

Armenian weavers have worked at a high level for centuries, and in the interwar years their workshops produced large decorative pieces in the Soltanabad idiom, the broad all-over palmette style named for the central weaving district where it was first commercialized. This rug is an Armenian weaving through and through: a cotton foundation, hand-spun wool pile with real luster, and a firm, even village-workshop knot that you can read on the folded-back corner. The handle is substantial and heavy, which is what you want in a 12'6" x 21'2" floor covering, and the selvedges and ends are original and sound. Collectors evaluating a piece like this usually start with the wool and the dye behavior, and our guide on how to date an Oriental rug covers the same checkpoints we used to place this one in the 1930s. If you are weighing the distinction between this kind of weaving and workshop production further east, the comparison in our article on Persian rugs vs Oriental rugs is the clearest explanation we have written.