4'5" x 7' Persian Sarouk Mohajeran Rug | Salmon Field with Indigo Floral Border | 1930s Antique

This is a genuine antique from the best decade of Sarouk weaving, a 4'5" x 7' piece knotted in the 1930s on a cotton foundation with a dense, tightly packed wool pile. The salmon ground still carries the soft glow that collectors look for in Persian Sarouk rugs of this period, and the drawing is far more disciplined than the commercial work that followed. The ends and sides are sound, the pile is original throughout, and roughly 90 years of use have given the wool the light, waxy patina that cannot be manufactured. It ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming origin, age, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The field is an all-over composition of detached floral sprays, the Sarouk signature, arranged in mirrored rows so that no two quarters of the rug read the same way at a glance. At the center sits a small horizontal lozenge in deep indigo, flanked by 2 leaf-shaped cartouches that each frame a soft ivory and brown blossom, with an 8 petal rosette at the exact midpoint. Above and below it, cypress-like sprays, serrated leaves and large palmettes rise on thin blue vines, while clusters of tiny 4 petal flowers fill the ground between them. The main border runs on a dark indigo band with alternating palmettes and flowering branches, framed on both sides by ivory and blue guard stripes carrying a reciprocal vine. The 4 corners resolve cleanly, which on a village-scale loom is a sign of a weaver working from a well-drawn cartoon rather than improvising.

A Salmon Field Framed in Indigo and Green

The field color is the reason this rug exists: a warm salmon that sits between rose and soft terracotta, gently uneven across the width where the dye lots changed, which is exactly what you want to see in a natural-dyed antique. Against it, the drawing is carried almost entirely in navy and indigo, from near-black in the border ground to a clear mid-blue in the vines and leaf outlines. Green appears in a muted sage and olive tone through the leaves and parts of the guard stripes, with ivory used for highlights, blossom centers and the reciprocal vine, and small notes of camel and warm brown inside the central cartouches. The overall effect is soft and lived-in rather than loud, and the salmon shifts noticeably with the light, reading pinker under daylight and deeper rust under lamps.

Sarouk Mohajeran: the Village and the Weave

Sarouk is a village in the Arak district of west central Persia, and Mohajeran is the neighboring settlement whose weavers produced the finest Sarouks of the 1920s and 1930s. The distinction matters: Mohajeran pieces are knotted tighter, use better and glossier local wool, and draw their florals with a rounder, more curvilinear line than standard Sarouk output of the same years. The back of this rug shows small, even knots and a firm handle, the kind of build that has already survived decades of foot traffic and will handle decades more. Structural traits like the wool quality, the dye behavior and the border drawing are the same evidence used to date an antique Oriental rug, and everything here points squarely at pre-war Mohajeran work.