Handmade rugs from Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), known for their distinctive geometric patterns, vibrant colors, and cultural symbolism. These rugs often feature stylized motifs representing fertility, protection, and good fortune, with techniques dating back thousands of years, and are typically knotted with the symmetrical (Turkish) knot. Anatolian designs also traveled: Kurdish tribes with Anatolian roots carried them to Iran, where they still echo in Quchan rugs, and classic Turkish Oushak designs, together with Persian ones, became models for the mostly floral rugs of Pakistani workshops.
An animal fiber that tribal weavers sometimes use for a rug's foundation in place of wool, as in Gabbeh and Quchan rugs, while the pile itself stays wool. Together with mohair, camel hair and cow hair it is among the less common rug materials, seen mostly in tribal work, and it also turns up in some flat-woven kilims.
Rugs woven by Kurdish tribes and villagers in Iran. In the west, Bijar rugs come from Kurdistan Province and are dense and double-wefted, while Senneh rugs come from Kurdish weaving villages around Sanandaj. In the north-east, above Mashhad, Kurdish tribes settled by the Safavids in the 16th century to guard the border weave Quchan rugs, whose designs echo their Anatolian homelands. Kurdish weavers are known for handling strong colors without disharmony, and Kurdish tribal rugs of the greater Hamadan area are usually single-wefted.
Tribal rugs woven by Kurdish weavers around Quchan, north of Mashhad in northeastern Iran, a border region where the Safavid rulers settled Kurdish tribes to help guard the frontier. A wool or goat-hair foundation carries a wool pile at about 120 knots per square inch (roughly 186,000 per square meter), high for tribal work. Geometric medallion or all-over designs in strong red, blue or ivory fields resemble Caucasian rugs and, above all, Anatolian ones, since the weavers' ancestors came from Anatolia. Compact looms keep sizes small to medium, seldom wider than 6 ft (1.8 m) or longer than 13 ft (4 m).