Antique Kurdish Rugs
Hand-knotted and flat-woven pieces attributed to Kurdish weavers of north-west Persia and neighbouring uplands, made for village and tent floors and for carrying and storing household goods.
What Are Kurdish Rugs?
Kurdish weaving comes from the mountain and upland districts spanning north-west Persia, eastern Anatolia and northern Iraq, made by settled village and semi-nomadic households. Long narrow shapes suited both tent and village rooms, while bags and salt bags started as pack and storage equipment before being collected as textiles in their own right.
The piece you'll meet most is the runner. 'Runner' appears in 83 of 270 titles on Sellingantiques, with 'long' and 'narrow' close behind and 'kelleh' and 'carpet' adding more. Sampled runners measure three to six metres long against widths of 54 to 118cm, and the longest single title runs to 616cm.
The second stream is small: bag faces, salt bags, khorjin and one-off pieces such as a chanteh of 0.39 x 0.34m or a bag face of 60 x 60cm. Jaf attaches mainly to bag faces. This end of the category is weighted towards the archive rather than current stock.
Attributions divide between named districts and broader labels. Bidjar, Bijar and Senneh recur and are stronger in current listings than in the archive; Sauj Bulagh, Kolyai, Sanjabi, Hamadan and Varamin appear across the sample. Quchan and Kordi weaving from Khorassan is the one origin sitting east rather than west. Dealer dates run 1800 to 1950, with the mass between 1880 and 1920.
Where The Range Splits
Scale does most of the work. The highest-priced sampled pieces are kellehs and gallery carpets, in the region of 454 x 201cm, 536 x 234cm and 172 x 353cm, while small rugs of 1.3 to 1.5 metres sit at the bottom. Long formats carry the top of the range.
A specific origin lifts a piece above a plain one. Sauj Bulagh, spelled several ways across listings, is the rarest named origin and consistently sits at the very top; Bidjar, Senneh and Kolyai attributions cluster in the upper part of the sample. Titles reading only 'Kurdish Rug' spread across the lower and middle.
Age and description work the same way. Pieces the dealer dates 1800 to 1860 sit near the top, 1920s and 1930s dates cluster low. So does a named pattern or ground: shrub, boteh, Mina Khani, Memling gul, herati, dragon border, and yellow, ivory or camel grounds, all run higher than titles offering nothing but dimensions.
Retail Price Guide 2026
Typical UK retail prices for kurdish rugs, calculated from the Sellingantiques database of over a million retail prices indexed since 2003. This retail price guide relies exclusively on Sellingantiques data; no external sources or auction records are used, so the figures do not describe the wider market.
The longest Kurdish piece measured in a Sellingantiques title runs to 616cm. Several runners pass five metres while staying under a metre wide.
The Antique Kurdish Rugs Glossary
- Runner
- A long narrow floor piece, commonly 2.5 to 6 metres long and under about 1.2 metres wide in this category.
- Kelleh
- A long gallery-format carpet, several times longer than it is wide. Twelve titles use the word, and it sits alongside 'long rug' fairly loosely.
- Bag face
- The decorated front panel of a storage or saddle bag, cut or kept separate from its plain back.
- Khorjin
- A double saddlebag. A 'half saddle-bag' is one of the two pouches on its own.
- Namakdan
- A salt bag, with a narrow neck and a silhouette distinctive enough to make it a collected form.
- Boteh
- The teardrop or paisley motif, often repeated as an all-over field pattern rather than used as a single device.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long is a typical Kurdish runner?
Sampled runners on Sellingantiques regularly measure between three and six metres, against widths of 54 to 118cm. Several exceed five metres while staying under a metre wide.
The longest measured in a title runs to 616cm. At the narrow end, one runner is recorded at only 54cm across.
What dates do dealers give these rugs?
The dated field spans 1800 to 1950, and 250 of the 270 listings carry a clean year. The 1900s alone account for 80 of them, with the 1920s, 1880s and 1890s next.
Earlier pieces are thin but present: sixteen in the 1870s, twelve in the 1850s, four in the 1800s. Thirteen listings say only '19th Century', and dealer years are often rounded to a decade or given as 'circa 1900/20'.
Read those as an era rather than a precise decade.
Which regions do Kurdish rugs come from?
The bulk are attributed to north-west Persia and Persian Kurdistan, with named districts including Bidjar, Senneh, Sauj Bulagh, Kolyai, Sanjabi and Hamadan.
A smaller stream comes from eastern Anatolia and the southern Caucasus, with Malatya, Yuruk prayer rugs and South Caucasian runners among the sampled titles. Quchan and Kordi weaving from Khorassan is the one group sitting east rather than west.
Are small Kurdish bags collected as well as rugs?
Yes. Bag faces, salt bags, khorjin, juval, mafrash panels and yastiks all turn up, making up about a tenth of the category and weighted towards the archive.
They were made as household and pack equipment first. A chanteh of 0.39 x 0.34m and a 60 x 60cm bag face show how small the collectable end gets.
What does Jaf mean on a Kurdish listing?
Jaf is a Kurdish tribal grouping. The name appears in sixteen titles and attaches mainly to bag faces rather than to floor pieces.
Other tribal and district names in the archive include Sanjabi, Kolyai and Varamin.
How many Kurdish pieces come up each year?
Around 31 are listed a year on Sellingantiques, carried by 19 different dealers.
The mix runs from long runners and kellehs down to single bag faces, with occasional one-offs such as a Tasheh wheat sack, a Varamin khorjin, or a lot of seventeen assorted tribal salt bags.