9'2" x 12'7" Vintage Persian Tabriz Rug | Sarouk Medallion Design | Raspberry Red Open Field

This vintage Persian Tabriz measures 9'2" x 12'7" and takes the boldest possible route: a clear raspberry red field left almost entirely bare so that the Sarouk style medallion sits in the middle of it like a jewel on velvet. The 3/8" wool pile is still upright and even end to end, the handle is heavy and supple, and the back shows a tidy, regular knot grid with no repairs, holes or reweaves. Decades old and in excellent condition, it is a town weave built for a room that gets used, and at this footprint it falls squarely into the 9x12 Persian rugs class that most dining rooms and living rooms are sized for. It ships with our certificate of authenticity confirming origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a 3 part medallion: a red inner lozenge of mirrored palmettes and tiny cypress forms, set inside a stepped turquoise cartouche studded with 8 petal rosettes, all framed by a deep navy lobed surround filled with ivory arabesque scrollwork, serrated green leaves and salmon flowerheads. Two ivory quatrefoils break the silhouette at the waist, left and right, and a navy pendant shaped like a large boteh hangs from each end of the medallion on a thin vine, a detail that belongs to the Sarouk design vocabulary rather than the dense all over styles. Instead of formal spandrels, the 4 corners carry naturalistic bouquets: long stems of blue flowerheads, tulips and curling saw-toothed leaves that lean inward toward the medallion. The main border runs a continuous gold vine over a red ground, looping through palmettes, green leaf fans and blue rosettes, and it is held between navy guard stripes patterned with alternating gold crosses and pink and blue rosettes, visible clearly in the corner close-up.

A Raspberry Red Field Against Turquoise and Navy

Color is the whole argument here. The field is a saturated raspberry red, a cooler and more purple red than the brick tones of village work, and because it is left open it moves and breathes across the width with the soft tonal variation of hand-dyed wool. Against it the weaver set the one color most dyers avoided: a bright turquoise blue at the heart of the medallion, cooled further by the near-black navy that frames it. Between those poles run mid blue flowerheads, grass and olive greens in the leaves, saffron and gold in the vines and border outlines, chalky ivory in the scrollwork and quatrefoils, and a repeated salmon pink rosette that keeps the palette warm. The border red sits a shade deeper and browner than the field, which gives the whole rug a visible frame from a standing distance. This is a confident polychrome reading of red and burgundy Persian rugs, not a quiet one, and it anchors rooms with cream walls, dark wood or navy upholstery.

Tabriz Weaving and the Quality of This Piece

Tabriz, in the far northwest of Persia, is the country's oldest continuous commercial weaving city, and its workshops have always been willing to borrow a design from another town and redraw it to their own standard. That is what happened here: a Sarouk medallion and corner spray layout executed with Tabriz discipline, which shows in the symmetry of the medallion halves, the clean unbroken sweep of the border vine and the straight, true selvages. Tabriz counts fineness in Raj, the number of knots per gereh (about 2.75 in) across the width, and this rug sits in the solid mid range of that system: a tight, even knot grid on a cotton foundation, firm enough to hold crisp outlines in the ivory scrollwork yet woven with enough pile weight to take generations of traffic. The back photograph shows that grid plainly, with level rows, clean color transitions and the original hand-tied cotton fringe still intact at both ends.