The Story of Turkmen Gul Motifs: What Those Octagons in Your Rug Really Mean
Look at almost any Turkmen rug — or the rugs sold worldwide under the name "Bokhara" — and you'll see the same thing: rows of octagonal medallions marching across a field of deep red. Many people assume it's simply a pattern. It isn't. Those medallions are called guls, and each one is a tribal emblem with centuries of history woven into it. Learning to read them turns a beautiful rug into a document.
What is a gul?
The word gul is usually translated as "flower" in Persian, though some scholars connect it to an older Turkic word for clan or family. Both meanings fit. A gul is a roughly octagonal or diamond-shaped medallion, repeated in orderly rows across the rug's field, almost always quartered into four sections of alternating color. For the Turkmen tribes of Central Asia — nomadic weavers living between the Caspian Sea and the Amu Darya river — the gul functioned something like a coat of arms. Each major tribe wove its own.
An emblem, not a decoration
For centuries, you could identify which tribe made a rug by its gul alone:
- Tekke — the most famous gul: a flattened octagon quartered by fine lines that run right across the field, connecting every gul to its neighbors. Most rugs sold as "Bokhara" carry a version of the Tekke gul — Bokhara was never a tribe, just the great market city where these rugs were traded.
- Ersari — large, generous, rounded guls, often filled with stylized flowers or trefoils. The biggest versions earned the affectionate Western nickname "elephant's foot." Ersari weavers settled in Northern Afghanistan, which is why this gul dominates Afghan Turkmen weaving to this day.
- Yomud — diamond-shaped guls with hooked, latch-like edges, typically arranged diagonally rather than in straight columns.
- Saryk and Salor — older tribes whose crisp, stepped guls are especially prized by collectors; the Salor gul is often considered the most elegant of all.
Historically, the emblem carried real weight. Accounts of Turkmen life describe how a defeated or absorbed tribe would sometimes give up its own gul and adopt the victor's — the pattern on the loom followed the politics of the steppe.
Why the field is always red
The deep reds of Turkmen weaving come from madder root, a dye plant the weavers knew intimately. Madder gives an extraordinary range — brick, rust, ruby, deep mahogany — depending on the age of the root, the water, and the mordant used. Red was practical (it hid the dust of camp life), prestigious, and, in the weavers' own tradition, protective. On a good rug the red is never flat: it shifts subtly from row to row where one dye batch ended and the next began, a natural effect called abrash that collectors actively seek out.
Reading a rug like a page
Once you know what to look for, a Turkmen rug organizes itself. The large primary guls carry the tribal identity. Between them sit smaller minor guls — secondary motifs like the star-shaped chemche — that fill the field with rhythm. The borders frame everything with running vines, latch-hooks and amulet forms. Nothing is random; every element has a name and a lineage that weavers passed from mother to daughter, memorized rather than drawn, for hundreds of years.
The gul today
The great tribal confederations no longer roam the steppe, but the guls never stopped. Turkmen weavers in Northern Afghanistan — many of them descendants of Ersari families who crossed the Amu Darya generations ago — still weave the old emblems on hand looms with hand-spun wool, in rugs sold today as Ersari, Khal Mohammadi and Bokhara. When you put one on your floor, you're not buying a print of an old design; you're getting the latest link in an unbroken chain.
Seeing guls in person
The best way to learn guls is simply to look at a lot of them. Browse our collection of Turkmen and Ersari rugs and compare the medallions rug to rug — you'll start recognizing tribes within minutes. Smaller Baluch pieces make a wonderful contrast, with their own darker, more intricate vocabulary, and our full shop lets you filter by size and style. And if you'd like to know the story behind a specific rug — its gul, its region, its age — send us a message on WhatsApp. Reading rugs is our favorite subject.