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Isfahan Rugs

Isfahan Rugs

Isfahan Rugs: Half the World in Wool

Persians have a proverb: Isfahan is half the world. The old imperial capital earned it with turquoise domes, mirrored palaces and tiled arcades that still stop travelers mid-stride, and the city's weavers absorbed all of it. An Isfahan rug is that architecture translated into wool: the arabesques that climb the mosque walls, the medallions that mirror the domes overhead, drawn with a fluency no other weaving city matches. When collectors speak of Persian rugs as art, this is usually the city they mean. Every Isfahan rug on this page is hand-knotted, one-of-a-kind, and photographed exactly as it will arrive.

The materials answer the ambition. Isfahan workshops weave kork, the soft first-shearing wool from the lamb's shoulders, onto foundations of pure silk, a combination that permits 500 knots per square inch and beyond while keeping the surface luminous. The finest pieces carry a woven signature from workshops whose names function like those of painters, and we read every cartouche in-house, in Farsi, before a rug is listed. Our complete guide to Isfahan rugs covers the signatures, the materials and how the masterpiece tier is judged.

Isfahan sits at the summit of a range worth exploring whole. The neighboring city's Persian Nain rugs pursue a similar fineness in a cooler ivory-and-indigo voice, Tabriz rugs answer from the north with bolder, more architectural drama, and Bijar rugs represent the opposite virtue entirely, weaving built for centuries of use rather than the collector's wall. Our rug experts can walk you through the differences piece by piece on phone or chat, any hour of the day. With free shipping and free returns in all 50 states and Canada, half the world is easier to bring home than it sounds.

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