The Persian Heriz rug weaving area lies to the east of Tabriz and the 35 x 35 mile area encompasses about 30 villages: Heriz, Ahar, Gorevan, Mehriban and others, with Serab at the far southeast corner. There is no Serapi village. The inhabitants are all Sunni Turks. The area is not agriculturally significant and carpet weaving is the major industry. The Tabriz carpet merchants have, since at least the mid-19th century, farmed out their lesser quality rugs to the lower cost rural Heriz area. Lower quality, as in weave quality, but not artistic qualities, for the best Heriz carpets are among the most artistically adventurous and exciting to come out of Persia in the last 150 years. At one point, the area produced nearly 10,000 carpets per year from around 3000 looms. [...]
The Persian Heriz rug weaving area lies to the east of Tabriz and the 35 x 35 mile area encompasses about 30 villages: Heriz, Ahar, Gorevan, Mehriban and others, with Serab at the far southeast corner. There is no Serapi village. The inhabitants are all Sunni Turks. The area is not agriculturally significant and carpet weaving is the major industry. The Tabriz carpet merchants have, since at least the mid-19th century, farmed out their lesser quality rugs to the lower cost rural Heriz area. Lower quality, as in weave quality, but not artistic qualities, for the best Heriz carpets are among the most artistically adventurous and exciting to come out of Persia in the last 150 years. At one point, the area produced nearly 10,000 carpets per year from around 3000 looms.
Rug weaving goes back to the early 19th century, if not beyond. Allover patterns, especially the Mina Khani (a pattern replicating a floral trellis) were extremely popular rugs. The great expansion of the craft began in the 1870s with a period of experimentation in both design and structure. By the later 1890s, the modern Persian Heriz/Serapi carpet was born.
Heriz weaving is resolutely commercial and the locals are generally financially unable to afford their own production. Weaving Heriz rugs is carried out in households, one or two looms each, and there are no large factories. Women do the actual work although men are the master weavers and overseers. A number of the best Heriz carpets are signed and dated, and we can identify master artisans of particular artistic skill.
The foundations of 20th century carpets are all cotton, although earlier pieces may employ wool for the warp, or for the weft, or both, or mix wool and cotton in any number of ways. Most of these antique rugs are double-wefted, but some early ones from Bilverdi village have single wefts and there are plenty of single-wefted later carpets as well. The knot is always the symmetric or Turkish knot, moderately coarsely tied. "Serapi" is a grade term, denoting those antique Heriz carpets with a finer weave, more curvilinear drawing, depressed alternate warps, more erect pile and closer general approximation to antique Fereghan Sarouks or antique Mohtasham Kashans. The coarser type is the Gorevan with a floppier, less substantial handle. The pile wool, from the Shah Savan tribes to the northeast, is locally handspun and so are the foundation threads. Sizes and formats vary, but 90% are in standard carpet sizes: 8' by 10' and over, up to 12' by 18'. Anything exceeding that is a custom order. Scatters and runners are also woven, but most runners from the general area are Karajehs or Serabs. These antique Persian rugs are woven on upright looms of the Tabriz warp slide-around type and hence the resulting carpets cannot exceed twice the loom height in length.
The dyes are superb. The local village dyer is responsible not only for the several indigo blues, but also for the particularly warm and rich madder, along with numerous other shades including a clear yellow, rose, camel, a second brighter red, ochre and various greens from bottle to lime. A good Heriz will have 12 or even more distinct tones, all crisp and solid, immune to fading or changing out of sort. No other village or tribal Persian rugs comes close to the wide Heriz color palette.
Most of the Heriz/Serapi carpets from about 1890 onwards are in medallion styles. A navy palmette pendanted medallion, usually eight pointed, is often set on a hexagonal madder field with ivory corners, within a dark blue border in either the bent leaf and rosette, or the turtle styles. But there are ivory or blue ground medallion pieces, and allover patterns from the iconic Herati to cypresses and weeping willows to imaginative copies of classical Turkish carpets as well as centralized designs with enormous leaves, and the list continues. The drawing is more or less chunky, though not fully geometric in the Caucasian manner. The Heriz rug weavers can make anything, even a rustic pictorial rug. The earliest pieces of the modern era, from the 1870s, tend to a red, white, and blue palette much like antique Kazak rugs. Later carpets expand the palette, and add more secondary and tertiary stylized elements to the field.
The designs for antique rugs from Heriz generally originate in Tabriz and are drawn on small pieces of cloth. From these the talented weavers can imagine and create room size carpets. This is the only Persian village rug district where this procedure is used. Samplers (Wagireh) are rare. Once the weavers have completed a carpet, they retain the design mentally and have no need for any external aids. Many of the best carpets, especially from the 1900-1929 period, are one-offs. The medallion and corner design is a Heriz interpretation of a Tabriz mainstay, yet so popular is the Heriz look that many Tabriz carpets of the 1920s copy the Heriz rug�s rustic angularity.
From the mid-19th century until around 1890, there was a small production of very fine, single wefted all silk rugs with medallion or allover patterns, and up to 500 knots per square inch. The surfaces are ultra-silky smooth, the execution is precise and the colors positively radiant. The shift of luxury rug production to Tabriz ended this glorious sidetrack to Heriz weaving. The later silk Tabrizes lack the idiosyncratic Heriz touch.
There is really no substitute for antique or vintage Heriz rugs. Bold designs partner with Caucasian rugs beautifully, and what is a Heriz anyway, but a room size Kazak? Antique rugs from Heriz have been copied in India, in Pakistan, in Oushak, in Tabriz, in machine made everywhere, but these �substitutes� are just copies; nothing more, a whole lot less, and certainly not authentic. The pure colors, powerful eye-holding designs and simple directness allow them to go with anything. They have never gone out of style and have never changed to follow the vagaries of style trends.