Green Rugs

There is no green dye in the traditional Persian cupboard. Green is made by dyeing the yarn yellow and then dipping it in indigo, or the reverse, so every green in an old rug is two dyes stacked on one fibre. Since the yellow fades and the indigo does not, green is the least stable colour in a hand-knotted rug and the most interesting to read.

Two dyes, one yarn

A dyer wanting sage dipped a weld or pomegranate yellow briefly in the indigo vat. Wanting bottle green, he dipped it long. The proportions were judged by eye and by experience, which is why greens vary more from batch to batch than any other colour and why a green field is more likely than a red one to band into abrash.

Why it drifts

The yellow component breaks down under light and the indigo does not, so a green ages toward blue. A hundred-year-old rug showing teal in the field very often showed green when it was new, and a border that reads grey-blue may have been olive. This is not damage and it is not a repair: it is the honest arithmetic of two dyes with different lifespans, and it is one of the reasons a rug from before 1970 looks the way it does. The same logic runs the other way on the sunward edge, where the yellow goes first and fastest.

Where green is used, and where it is avoided

Green is comparatively rare as a full field in Persian city weaving and appears more often in borders, leaves and spandrels, partly because of the colour's religious standing in parts of the Islamic world. Where it does carry a rug, it tends to be soft: the sage grounds of Tabriz and Kerman, and the deliberately low-saturation greens of Ziegler and Oushak production. Bakhtiari panel rugs use a strong green in single compartments, and Turkish weaving, including prayer rugs, uses it more freely than Persian weaving does.

A warning about buying it from a photograph

Green is the hardest colour in a rug to judge on a screen. Displays are built to make green vivid, and every step between the rug and the eye pushes it further. A sage that looks grey in the photograph can arrive olive, and an olive can arrive khaki. Of all the entries in this way of shopping, green is the one worth seeing in daylight before committing. Compare it against the yellow half of its own recipe and the difference is obvious in the hand and invisible online. Ask for wool samples if the rug is far away.