Senneh Rugs
Senneh is the old trade name for Sanandaj, the capital of Iranian Kurdistan. The rugs are the finest and by a long way the thinnest Kurdish weaving, with a clipped pile, a single weft and a handle closer to heavy cloth than to carpet. Bijar, sixty miles north, is the same tradition taken in precisely the opposite direction.
The opposite of its neighbour
Two Kurdish towns in the same province, roughly sixty miles apart, arrived at opposite conclusions about what a rug should be. Bijar beat its wefts down until the rug became a plank. Senneh went the other way: fine knotting, a single weft, and a pile clipped so short that the drawing sits almost level with the foundation. Pick up a Senneh and the surprise is the weight. A six by four is light enough to carry folded over an arm, which no Bijar of any size will ever be.
Thin by design
The short pile is not economy. It is what makes the pattern possible. A fine single-weft foundation with a low pile gives the weaver a tight grid and nothing standing above it to blur an outline, so a Senneh can hold small-scale repeating detail that a thicker rug turns to mush. The trade-off is honest and worth saying plainly: there is very little pile in reserve. A Senneh has less to give up than almost any Persian rug, so it belongs in a room that is walked rather than trafficked. It is the wrong rug for a hallway, a doorway or under a dining chair, and it is a poor choice in a house with large dogs. For those jobs the same province supplies a Bijar or a Hamadan.
The knot that carries the name and is not used
One of the pleasant absurdities of the trade: the asymmetrical knot, used across most of central and eastern Persia, is widely called the Senneh knot. Senneh weavers themselves commonly used the symmetrical one. The name is a nineteenth-century European convention that stuck, and it tells nothing about any particular rug from the town. The construction detail that does matter is the single weft, which Senneh shares with the Hamadan villages and which accounts for the flat, firm, slightly ribbed back.
Fields, and the prayer format
The characteristic Senneh field is the Herati repeat, drawn very small and very evenly across the whole ground, often on ivory or a soft indigo, sometimes with a slender diamond medallion barely interrupting it. Boteh repeats are the other common choice, again small and dense. Senneh is also one of the classic sources of the prayer rug: a narrow field closed at one end by a pointed arch, woven in the under four by six sizes that format requires. The town is equally famous for its flat weaves, and a Senneh kilim is a separate and highly regarded object with no pile at all. See flat weaves for that side of the tradition.
Colour
Senneh dyeing is restrained by Kurdish standards. Indigo blue in two or three values, madder in the pink-to-brick range rather than full red, undyed ivory, and small quantities of green and yellow used as punctuation. Because the pile is short and the knot count high, the colours read as fields of even tone rather than as the mottled surface a long pile produces. The wool is good local fleece, spun fine.
Where a Senneh earns its place
Under a bed, in a study, in a bedroom, on a wall, in any room where a rug is looked at more than it is walked on. The thinness is an advantage in the places thickness is a nuisance: it sits flat under a door that already clears the floor by nothing, and it layers over a larger plain rug without a trip hazard. In a formal room it does something few Persian rugs manage, which is to be fine without being glossy. If the requirement is fineness with more presence, a Tabriz at high raj covers it; if it is fineness with a sheen, look at silk. Within Persian weaving Senneh is the specialist's Kurdish rug, and within traditional design it is one of the quietest.
