Turkmen Rugs

Turkmen weaving comes from the tribal confederations of Central Asia, and it is the most disciplined of all the great rug traditions. Almost every piece is built on the gul, a repeating octagonal medallion, set in ordered rows across a field that is usually dominated by deep madder red, with brown and coral as its usual companions. Dark blue and ivory, so common elsewhere, are the exception on the Turkmen pieces we hold. Each confederation favoured its own gul, which is how these rugs are attributed. The Tekke, the Ersari and the Yomud, which our listings spell Yamoud, are all represented here, while the Salor and Saryk are groups we do not currently stock. Formats follow tribal life rather than the furnished room. Alongside main carpets there are the ensi, woven to hang across the doorway of a yurt, and the bag faces that served as storage. Because the Turkmen design vocabulary travelled so widely, rugs drawing on it were later woven well beyond Turkmenistan, in Afghanistan, Persia and Pakistan, which is why the pieces gathered here span more than one origin. See also our Turkmen engsi rugs. Four measured facts about the antique Turkmen rugs we hold are worth having before you browse. Format is the first and it governs everything else: across the 41 in stock the median piece covers 21 square feet against 61 for our antique inventory, the median long side is 5.4 feet against 10.0, and not one of the 41 is larger than 150 square feet. Second, that smallness is not a discount. The median asking price is $6,375 against $9,800 across our antiques, which looks like a saving of a third, but measured by the square foot the group runs $188 against $167 and no cut matched on area shows a real reduction. Third, scale separates the confederations more clearly than anything else in our records: the 16 pieces titled Tekke have a median area of 10.5 square feet, the 14 titled Ersari or Beshir a median of 36.8. Fourth, this is the oldest group we have measured, with 32 of the 41 carrying a 19th century date and exactly one carrying a 1920s one. Our antique Turkmen rug buying and identification guide sets out the subgroup by subgroup data, the price per square foot bands, and how to separate a tribe from a function from a market town when all three appear in one name.