7'6" x 10'6" Persian Heriz Rug | Vintage Geometric Medallion | 1980s Village Weave

This is a village Heriz from the 1980s, hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation and still carrying a full, even pile after four decades of careful use. The field is a deep tomato red, the medallion is drawn in black-navy with an ivory heart, and the two ends open into generous cream spandrels that give the whole piece air. At 7'6" x 10'6" it sits in the most useful range we sell, large enough to hold a sofa and two chairs with the front legs on the wool, and it is one of the better value options among 8x11 Persian rugs. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity recording the origin, age, materials and exact measurements.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is pure Heriz: a large stepped medallion with hooked arms, an 8 petal rosette at the dead center, and serrated leaves and angular vine arms filling the field around it rather than any curved arabesque. Look closely at the field and you will find small ivory combs, stylized cypress sprigs and tiny tulip heads scattered between the vine work, the sort of improvised detail a weaver adds from memory rather than from a cartoon. The main border runs a black-navy ground with alternating rosettes, 8 pointed stars and leaf cartouches, flanked by narrow reciprocal guard stripes in red and ivory. The 4 corners are resolved with matching cream brackets, each one filled with its own miniature vase and palmette group, which is exactly the formula collectors look for in geometric Persian rugs.

A Field of Deep Red with Navy, Ivory and Olive

The dominant color is a dense tomato red that shifts toward brick where the pile leans away from the light, with occasional lighter salmon passages that read as natural abrash from different dye lots of handspun wool. Against it, the medallion and the main border sit in a black-navy so dark it looks almost charcoal in the overall photo and resolves into true indigo in the close-ups. Cream and soft ivory carry the medallion center, the corner spandrels and the fine outlining, while a muted olive khaki appears in the serrated leaves, the vine stems and parts of the border cartouches, cooling the red down. Clear mid-blue, rust brown and small touches of pink finish the palette, which makes this an easy match for anyone shopping red and burgundy Persian rugs for a room with dark wood floors or white walls.

Heriz: Village Weaving East of Tabriz

Heriz is a group of villages east of Tabriz, on the lower slopes below Mount Sabalan, and its reputation rests on two things: mineral-rich water that sets the dyes hard, and local wool that is famously tough and slightly coarse. Weavers there work from memory in straight lines and stepped angles, which is why a Heriz never tries to imitate the curved drawing of a city workshop and never needs to. Village Heriz weaving usually runs under 200 knots per square inch, and the coarser knot is the point, it leaves a thick, heavy pile that takes decades of traffic without thinning, as the fold photographs of this piece show. The handspun wool, the slightly irregular abrash and the drawing style are all useful markers if you want to date an Oriental rug yourself, and everything on this one points to the 1980s workshop-free village tradition it came from.