8'6" x 16'7" Bokhara Oriental Rug | Turkoman Gul All-Over Design | Oversize Red Wool

At 8'6" x 16'7" this is a gallery-length Bokhara, long enough to run the full length of a great room or an open plan living and dining space without a break in the pattern. It is hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation with a tight 3/8" pile, and the weave shown on the reverse in the last photograph is even and fine from selvage to selvage, which is why the design holds its line over almost 17 feet. Lengths like this are hard to find, and among oversize hand-knotted rugs a Bokhara in excellent condition with full pile is rarer still. Every rug we ship carries a certificate of authenticity confirming it is hand-knotted, along with its size, material and origin.

Design and Motifs

The field carries the classic Bokhara formula: rows of quartered octagonal guls, often called the elephant foot motif, set in a strict grid and separated by small stepped cross panels. Count across the width and you have 6 columns of guls marching the full 16'7" length, each one drawn with four black quadrants filled with hooked ivory and apricot devices. This is an all-over design with no central medallion, so the rug reads the same from every side of the room and nothing is lost when furniture sits on it. The main border runs a chain of diamond cartouches with radiating star fillers, flanked by narrow guard stripes of blocky T-shapes and dotted bands, 8 stripes deep on each long side. Both ends finish with a wide flatwoven kilim skirt of zigzag lattice work in ivory, apricot and dark brown, then a clean ivory fringe, which is the traditional Turkoman finish and a good indicator of an honest tribal-pattern weave.

A Field of Brick Red With Ivory, Black and Apricot

The ground is a saturated brick red that warms toward terracotta where the light crosses the pile and drops to a deep burgundy in the shadow, exactly the colour movement you want from good wool. Against it the guls are outlined in a near-black brown and filled with chalk ivory and a soft apricot orange, and that ivory is doing the real work: it lifts every octagon off the red and keeps a pattern this dense from turning into a single block of colour. The border zone runs darker, with black cartouches and burgundy ground giving the long sides a defined frame, while the apricot diamonds repeat at intervals to carry the warm accent all the way around the 4 sides. The kilim ends bring the ivory forward in bold zigzags, a bright finish at both ends of the rug. Overall it is a red rug that reads rich rather than loud, and it sits comfortably with wood floors, leather, brass and cream walls.

Woven in Pakistan in the Turkoman Bokhara Tradition

The Bokhara design belongs to the Turkoman tribes of Central Asia, named for the market city where their weavings were traded, and the gul was originally a tribal emblem repeated as a clan signature. Pakistani workshops took up the pattern after the mid 20th century and refined it, weaving on cotton warps with the double knot and clipping the pile low so the small hooked details inside each gul stay legible. That is a different discipline from village work: the grid here does not wander, the gul rows stay square across 102" of width, and the selvages and kilim ends are finished by hand to the same standard as the field. As an Oriental rug in this length, it belongs to a small group of pieces that can actually fill a long room properly, and the short dense pile means it will take heavy traffic for decades without matting down.