9'8" x 12'6" Persian Tabriz Rug | Floral Medallion on Cherry Red | 1980s Workshop Weave

This is city weaving, not village weaving, and you can see it in the first photograph: a lobed indigo medallion drawn with a compass-steady outline, four spandrels that answer it exactly, and a wide border whose vine never loses its rhythm around a 12'6" length. Woven in Tabriz during the 1980s on a cotton foundation with a full wool pile, the rug has reached roughly 40 years of age with its nap standing even from fringe to fringe and its selvages intact. The dyes have mellowed into that slightly deeper, slightly quieter register that only time gives, so it reads as a mature Persian rug rather than a new one. At 9'8" x 12'6" it sits squarely in the 10x13 Persian rugs class, large enough to carry a full dining table with chairs pulled out or to float a sofa and two chairs entirely on wool. Every rug we sell leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity naming origin, materials and construction.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a cream cartouche built around an 8 petal rosette, each petal filled with a small blue or rose flowerhead, set inside a deep indigo medallion of scalloped lobes packed with pink roses, serrated olive leaves and curling palmettes. Above and below, pendant finials drop into the open field and end in little woven vases of flowers, and the field itself is scattered with flowering sprays, cypress-like sprigs and clusters of small blue dotted berries that read like bunches of grapes. The 4 corner spandrels repeat the medallion's vocabulary in miniature, each one anchored by a pale celadon cartouche holding a tiny bouquet. The border system runs 3 deep: a main indigo band carrying alternating ivory and celadon boteh cartouches separated by rosettes and saw-edged leaves, framed inside and out by ivory guard stripes with a continuous rosette and vine meander. Every element is bilaterally symmetrical, which is the hallmark of a drawn cartoon rather than an improvised pattern.

Colors: Cherry Red, Indigo and Garden Green

The field is a cherry red that leans toward raspberry where the light rakes across the pile, warmer and more luminous than the brick reds of the eastern Persian towns, and a faint horizontal tonal shift across the upper field is natural abrash from a hand-dyed wool batch rather than fade or wear. Against it the medallion and main border sit in a true indigo navy, deep enough to look nearly black in the shadows and clearly violet-blue in direct light. Greens appear twice and differently: a dark olive in the leaves and stems, and a soft celadon sea green in the spandrel and border cartouches that acts as the cooling note for the whole palette. Ivory does the structural work in the guard stripes and the medallion core, while rose pink, saffron gold, sky blue and chocolate brown fill the smaller flowerheads and outlines. If a warm red ground is what you are after, this piece belongs with the best of the red and burgundy Persian rugs.

Tabriz: Weaving Standards in Northwest Persia

Tabriz sits in the northwest corner of Persia, in Azerbaijan province near the Turkish frontier, and it has been the commercial and technical capital of Persian weaving since the Safavid era. Tabriz workshops measure their own fineness in Raj, the number of knots counted across a gereh of about 2.75 inches of width, and they weave on taut cotton warps with a symmetrical knot pulled tight against a drawn cartoon. That discipline is exactly what produces the clean curved outlines, the unbroken border vine and the matched spandrels you see here, work that a loom without a paper design cannot reproduce at this scale. The reverse, visible at the folded corner, shows a level back and consistent rows, the sign of experienced weavers working steadily rather than racing. Pieces from this decade are now the sweet spot for buyers who want genuine city drawing with some age on it, and if you want to understand what puts a rug in the 1980s rather than the 1940s, read our guide on how to date an oriental rug.