5'5" x 13'6" Persian Herati Runner Rug | All Over Mahi Fish Pattern | Semi-Antique Red & Navy Wool

This is a true gallery piece: 13'6" long and 5'5" wide, too wide to be a corridor strip and too long to be a standard area rug, which is exactly why a Persian gallery runner in this shape is so hard to find. It was hand-knotted on a cotton foundation with a hard-wearing wool pile, and the pile still stands evenly from end to end with full fringe at both ends and tight original selvages, as the back and ruler photo show. The drawing is a classic Herati repeat carried the full length of the field without a central medallion, which is the older village way of handling a long format. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming it is hand-knotted and Persian, and this one is priced as a usable semi-antique rather than a museum piece.

Design and Motifs

The field is a continuous Herati lattice, known in Persia as mahi or the fish pattern: a small rosette sits inside each diamond compartment, flanked by 4 curved lancet leaves that read like fish circling the flower head. Here the weaver has drawn the repeat large and boldly, with chunky hooked vine joints, 8 petal rosettes, palmettes and little stepped crosses filling the diamonds, so the all over Herati design stays legible even from across a long room. There is no medallion and no empty ground, which is what keeps a 13'6" runner from looking stretched. The main border is the striking part: ivory and rose zigzag panels alternating with squared rosette cartouches, outlined by a dark navy guard stripe and an inner leaf-and-vine minor border, then a final rust band of small blossoms and heart-shaped florets at the ends. The repeats shift slightly along the length, the honest signature of a single weaver working a village loom from memory rather than a traced cartoon.

Colors: Raspberry Red Over Indigo, With Ivory Relief

The field works on two grounds at once. The lattice itself is drawn in a deep raspberry red, warm and slightly madder-toned, while the ground showing through behind it is a dark indigo navy, so the whole field shimmers between red and blue depending on where you stand and which way the pile is brushed. Inside the compartments the weaver has dropped in rose pink rosettes, soft gold and ochre leaf tips, olive green accents and clear ivory highlights that pop against the dark ground and keep the repeat from going flat. The border reverses the balance: ivory and cream dominate the zigzag panels, with rust red, rose and a little powder blue in the rosette squares, all held in by near-black navy outlines. It sits comfortably among red Persian rugs but has far more blue in it than a plain red rug, which makes it easy to place against navy, cream or walnut furnishings.

Persian Village Weaving and the Quality of This Runner

The Herati repeat is one of the oldest and most widely woven patterns in Persia, and it survived precisely because village weavers could carry it in their heads and extend it to any length of loom. This piece shows that tradition at its most practical: a sturdy cotton warp and weft, a medium-length wool pile with real lanolin lustre, and a knot count geared toward durability rather than fineness, which is why a runner like this is still flat, straight and fully piled after decades of use. Wool from mountain flocks takes madder red and indigo deeply, and the colours here have mellowed rather than faded, settling into the softly abrashed tone you only get from natural dyes and time. For a long hall, a wide upstairs landing, a galley kitchen run or the length of a dining table, a hand-knotted Persian runner in this width gives you the coverage of an area rug with the proportion of a runner.