7' x 12' Bokhara Turkmen Rug | Repeating Gul Lattice | 1980s Hand-Knotted Wool

This is a proper tribal piece: 7' x 12' of hand-knotted wool in the Turkmen Bokhara tradition, woven in Pakistan in the 1980s and still carrying a full, even pile with no thin spots. The field is a dark wine burgundy, lit from within by crimson and aubergine, and it is covered edge to edge with rows of ivory guls set on a diagonal lattice. The gallery proportion, wider than a runner and longer than a standard 8x10, is the kind of odd size that solves a long room no rectangular rug off the shelf can handle. Wool pile on a cotton foundation, hand-knotted throughout, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting size, materials, age and origin.

Design and Motifs

The field runs 6 vertical columns of guls, each one stepped and hooked in ivory against a serrated red lattice, with small orange and black ornaments filling the diamonds between them. There is no medallion and no open ground anywhere, which is exactly how these all over repeating designs are supposed to read. The main border carries a row of reciprocal hooked cartouches in ivory, red and black, framed by narrow guard stripes of tiny dotted diamonds. At both ends sits a wide elem panel filled with large angular tree and comb forms outlined in cream, the traditional skirt of a Turkmen weaving. One small woven panel is set into a side border with characters inside it, a personal mark from the loom rather than a commercial label. These are the kind of geometric tribal rug designs that hold up over decades because nothing about the drawing is fashionable.

Color: Burgundy, Aubergine and Ivory

The dominant color is a deep burgundy that shifts across the surface as the light moves, reading close to black aubergine in the shadowed columns and opening to a bright crimson where the pile lies the other way. That variation is the wool taking dye at slightly different rates, and it gives the field depth that a flat single-tone red never has. The ivory guls are genuinely creamy rather than stark white, a warm undyed tone that keeps the contrast soft. Black outlines sharpen every motif, and small hits of rust orange and burnt sienna appear inside the lattice diamonds and along the elem panels, maybe 3 or 4 percent of the surface but enough to warm the whole rug. The borders bring in more true red and more ivory, so the frame reads lighter than the field. Against oak or walnut floors, leather seating and cream plaster walls, as shown in the room photograph, it behaves as a grounding red and burgundy rug rather than a loud one.

Origin and Weaving Quality

Bokhara is a design name, not a place of manufacture. The guls belong to the Turkmen tribes of Central Asia, and the weaving centers of Pakistan took up the vocabulary and have produced it at a high standard for generations. This piece was made in Pakistan in the 1980s, hand-knotted on a cotton foundation with a dense, short wool pile that shows crisp motif edges even on the smallest ornaments, and the back photograph confirms a tight, regular knot across the whole width. The selvedges are intact, the cream fringe is original and full, and the pile stands evenly across all 84 inches of width. As an Oriental rug from the last great decade of Pakistani Bokhara production, it offers the wear resistance of a short tribal pile in a 40 year old weaving that has clearly been kept, not used hard.