8'2" x 11'8" Antique Persian Sarouk Rug | 1930s All-Over Floral Field | Original Pile, New Fringes

Woven in the 1930s, this 8'2" x 11'8" antique Sarouk carries the heavy wool pile and crowded floral drawing that made Persian Sarouk rugs the most requested Persian weaving of that decade. The pile still stands tall enough to feel springy underfoot, the knotting is even from end to end, and the colors have mellowed into the soft, slightly oxidized red that collectors pay for rather than avoid. It is a room-size piece that has clearly been cared for, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity stating origin, age, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

There is no central medallion here. Instead the field is filled with the classic Sarouk arrangement of detached floral sprays: large palmettes, open rosettes, bell shaped blossoms and curled serrated leaves, each drawn as its own bouquet and set free on the open red ground. The sprays are stacked in loose columns that mirror each other across the center line, with smaller cypress-like clusters anchoring the ends, so the pattern reads as a formal garden rather than a repeating grid. A gold ground main border carries a continuous procession of rosettes, palmettes and paisley buds on a scrolling vine, framed by 4 narrow guard stripes, 2 of them in dark indigo with tiny reciprocal florets. The drawing is curvilinear throughout, with outlines picked out in ivory and pale green so every bloom separates cleanly from its neighbor at normal viewing distance.

Antique Red, Indigo and Soft Green

The ground is the antique Sarouk red, a deep madder that has settled toward brick and salmon-rose where the light hits the pile, and stays cooler and darker in the shadow of the wool. Against it, the florals are built almost entirely from blues: near-black indigo for the outer petals and leaf spines, a mid sky blue for the interiors, and a lighter powder blue that appears in the smaller buds. Gold ochre carries the main border and repeats inside the larger palmettes, which is what keeps the rug from reading as a flat red and blue piece. Soft sage and olive green thread through the leaves, with rose pink and ivory used sparingly as highlights on the flower centers. The close-up photographs show how the shades shift with the nap direction, a sign of hand-spun wool and natural dyeing rather than a single flat machine-mixed color.

Sarouk Weaving in the Arak Valley

Sarouk is a village in the Arak region of west central Persia, part of the same weaving belt that produced the great Sultanabad workshop pieces. Sarouk weavers built their reputation on a very heavy, tightly packed knot laid over a cotton foundation, giving a rug with real weight and a thick pile that wears down slowly over generations. Pieces from the 1920s and 1930s were woven in quantity for the American market, which is why this drawing style, red ground with detached floral sprays, is still the first thing most people picture when they think of an antique Persian rug. The reverse of this example shows a clean, regular knot with no repairs or reweaving visible in the field, and the wool has the dry, lustrous feel of well-aged fleece. If you want to understand what tells you a rug is genuinely pre-war, our guide on how to date an antique Oriental rug walks through the same markers we used here.