9'9" x 13' Persian Sarouk Rug | Tomato Red Field, Deep Blue Medallion | Excellent Condition

At 9'9" x 13', this Sarouk is a true room-size floor piece, wide enough to hold a sofa group on all sides or a dining table with 8 chairs pulled out. The field is one unbroken sweep of tomato red, filled edge to edge with curved vine, palmettes and small ivory blossoms, and anchored by a single deep blue medallion drawn with scrolled arabesques. It is hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation with the pile clipped to 3/8", short enough that the fine drawing stays crisp and long enough to give the rug real weight underfoot. Condition is excellent, with full even pile, straight sides and clean white fringe, and it ships with our certificate of authenticity. If footprint is your deciding factor, you can compare it against our other 10x13 Persian rugs.

Design and Motifs

The layout is the classic Sarouk formula: one central medallion, matching spandrels at the 4 corners, and a densely populated field. The medallion is an 8 point star set inside a deep blue ground, its interior packed with hooked arabesque scrolls that curl back on themselves, with a pale ivory and camel rosette at the very center and small pendant finials reaching top and bottom toward the ends of the rug. Around it the field runs as a mirrored allover pattern of split palmettes, Shah Abbasi style blossoms, serrated lancet leaves and thin curving vine, all drawn with the fluid curved line that separates workshop drawing from village drawing. The corner spandrels repeat the same vocabulary in blue, framing the red field without closing it in. The main border is a navy band carrying a rhythmic procession of palmettes and flowering stems joined by red tendrils, flanked on both sides by light blue and ivory guard stripes filled with a repeating rosette meander, then a fine barber pole line and a plain tomato red outer edge that finishes at hand-knotted white fringe.

The Tomato Red, Blue and Ivory Palette

The ground color is a warm tomato red with a slight salmon lift where the light catches the pile, not the cool burgundy of a Kashan and not the rust brown of a village weave. Seen in the angled photograph you can read the natural abrash, a soft horizontal variation in the red that tells you the wool was dyed in batches and is doing exactly what good wool should. Against that field sit two distinct blues: a dark indigo used for the medallion core, the corner grounds and the main border, and a lighter mid blue, close to a faded denim, used for the outlining vines, the guard stripes and much of the leafwork. Ivory does the drawing work, tracing the vine junctions, outlining the palmettes and lighting up the center of the medallion, and it is joined by small amounts of soft gold, camel, sea green and a pale rose in the individual flower heads. The net effect is a saturated, warm, formal red room-size rug that still reads as light because of how much ivory and blue outlining floats across the field.

Sarouk Weaving in Central Persia

Sarouk is a weaving village north of Arak in central Persia, and the name has long covered the best of the surrounding workshop production. The weavers there built a reputation on two things: heavy, tightly packed construction on a cotton foundation, and formal curvilinear drawing borrowed from the old court repertoire rather than tribal geometry. That combination is why a good Sarouk stays flat, holds its shape in a big room and takes decades of traffic without thinning. On this piece the knot count is high enough to carry the thin vine work and the small blossom heads without the outlines breaking up, and the back shown in the last photograph is even, tight and regular from edge to edge. Our guide to Persian Sarouk rugs goes deeper into how the type is graded and what separates village Sarouk from the workshop pieces.