What You should know About Sarouk Rugs History and Future
Sarouk carpets are arguably the most recognized vintage and antique Persian rugs in the American market. Famous for their intricate curvilinear floral design and bold colors, often deep red and blue fields of color. Rug cleaners see these in abundant numbers of antique sarouk rugs woven between 1900 and 1950s, still in use many for over a hundred years.
The name Sarouk is so familiar to rug dealers and cleaners worldwide. Sarouk or Saruq, whose spelling varies, is located in the Farahan district of western Iran, some 15–20 miles north of the principal city of Arak. Even today, Sarouk is a small town; in a 2006 census, its population was only 2,189.
How did such a small town become well-known in the western rug market and supply many rugs to American and European homes?
In contrast to much larger rug weaving cities such as Tabriz with 1.5 million people, Kerman with 821,000, and Kashan with 433,000, such a small city to be such a big player in the emerging global rug market, or was it?
By the late 19th century, demand for hand-woven rugs exceeded the large weaving center of Tabriz. Forced companies to seek weavers south of Tabriz, the Hamadan, and Sultanabad, known today as Arak today. It’s important to state that in Iran, weaving is part of their culture and more so a hundred years ago. In the new towns these companies explored; they found skilled, experienced weavers ready to weave their sarouk rugs.
Farahan Sarouk Carpets
The town of sarouk wasn’t the only town weaving Sarouk rugs. The first clue is in the name Farahan, the district where Sarouk and two other cities reside in Farmahin, Khenejin. These villages and more wove Farahan Sarouk rugs at the turn of the century to feed the western exporter’s insatiable demand for rugs. Sarouk, in name, became a trade term for a type of rug and not just a source town for sounding villages in Arak and Hamadan.
Mohajeran Sarouk
Sarouk weaving outside of Arak is wildly evident when Mohajeran Sarouks rugs entered the market around the turn of the 20th century. Mohajaran is in the neighboring district of Hamadan. Hamadan is both a town and a district neighboring Arak( sultanabad). The village of Mohajeran is closer to the city of Hamadan than the town of Sarouk. Color design and weave are that of Sarouk, but the rugs geographically are not. Yet the term Mohajaran Sarouk stuck even though the term is outdated and inaccurate to the geographic location of the two towns. This isn’t unique or unusual in the rug world.
Jozan (Jowzan) Sarouk
Like Mohajeran, Jozan rugs look like Sarouok rugs but are made outside the area we associate with Sarouk rugs. It’s important to note that Jozan rugs have structural, color, and slight design differences that often separate Jozan from sarouks carpets.
Rise of the painted Sarouk or American Sarouk.
By the late ’20s, Americans’ taste favored deeper Laquer red in their rugs. This was at odds with the brick madder red found in sarouks and the dye purity laws for 1920–30’s Iran that forbid synthetic dyes.
The workaround was to paint the red fields with dye to make them deep red and usher in the age of the painted sarouk. While this was most common in sarouks other rugs, particularly from the Hamadan district, villages of Lilihan, and dergazine rugs, were pained in significant numbers in late 1920- 30
The front has been paid a deep ruby red, while the pack is the original brick red color.
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By the 1950s, taste and changes in demand for wall-to-wall carpets started taking a bigger bite out of oriental rugs sales. Combined with radical economic shifts in Oil-rich Iran, the 1950s ushered in a decline in sarouk carpets. Design, weave quality, and dyes suffered; they never recaptured the magic of the early production sarouks from the late 19th to 1930s.
In the late 1990s decent sarouk copies were made in Inda, but even these failed to capture the feeling of folk art that real Persian sarouk rugs have.
A not-so-happy story for antique and vintage rugs like Sarouks
The floral red and blue colors are no longer desirable to American rug buyers; many once-expensive rugs are now inexpensive. Classic Persian sarouk rugs and other vintage and antique rugs are falling victim to a new trend. These once incredible rugs are sold off at a steep discount and shipped to places like Turkey, where they are reworked.
Pile sheared and burnt off, colors bleached out, and a whole Frankenstein industry has cropped up to make vintage and antique rugs into a new kind of decorative rug.
In some cases, rugs will be over-dyed and sold as a whole rug if they have some decorative merit.
The Tabriz rug above has existing damage and will be used for making patchwork rugs. As the pic below shows, some rugs are cut into small pieces, often one ft squares, and sewn together to make a patchwork of pieces from different rugs.
A generation of classic Persian and Turkish rug weaving from 1900–1980s is disappearing, turning into rugs that may last a few years in many cases.
What heavy use on a floor in America, pets, kids, and time couldn’t do to quality hand-woven Persian rugs like Sarouks was done by consumer tastes and color trend forecasting.
Today, most consumers care about color, size, and price and not anything about the people that weave rugs. Designs are contemporary and basic at odds with the rich cultural history of design and symbolism woven in Persian carpets.
I imagine people will lament the loss of so many classic rugs like antique sarouks. These rugs will never be made again, the economic and cultural elements that lined up to make these amazing rugs is gone, and they will never come back.
If you have an antique rug-hold on to it tightly, I suspect that in the coming decade, they may become much more desirable than they are today. We are losing antique rugs of the world at a faster rate from the ravages of time and more so from the ravages of “style”
Article by Renaissance Rug Cleaning
