Mashhad, Northeast Persia
The Mashhad carpet comes from the city of the same name in northeast Persia, which has about three million inhabitants and is thus the second largest city in Persia. Maschhad was founded in 823 at the same time as the death of the eighth Shiite Imam Ali ibn Musa ar-Reza, to whom the Imam-Reza shrine in Maschhad is dedicated. As a result, Mashad has become a place of pilgrimage with about 20 million tourists and pilgrims a year.
The city itself is rather agricultural, the main products are wool and the carpets made with it. The Mashhad carpet comes predominantly in a red ground color with light violet or Bordeaux tones and is finely knotted. The Persian knot is usually used for the knots. The most famous families who produced the best rugs in the past century were Emoghli, who originally came from Tabriz, Northwest Persia, and the Ghazikhan and the Sabet Familes. They mostly applied natural and vegetable dyes which made their rugs very desirable.