The Turkish Knot and the Persian Knot
The Turkish knot and the Persian knot are the two structures used to tie pile. The symmetrical Gördes knot wraps a pair of warp threads and returns between them; the asymmetrical Senneh knot wraps one warp and passes behind the other. Both are woven in Türkiye and in Iran, and neither name says where a rug was made.
The sentence heard most often across a shop counter is that a rug was tied with the Turkish knot and is therefore stronger. Both halves of it are shakier than they sound. What follows is what the two knots physically are, where their names came from, what has actually been measured on the looms of Anatolia, and how much of any of it bears on how long a rug lasts.
Two knots, two structures
The difference is in how many warps each knot grips, and where its ends come out.
The symmetrical knot — the one the trade calls Turkish or Gördes — is wrapped around two warp threads, and both of its ends are drawn back up between that same pair, mirroring each other. It grips the pair.
The asymmetrical knot — Persian, or Senneh — is tied to the same pair of warps, but only one end comes up between them. The other passes behind a single warp and emerges beside it. That makes the knot handed: it opens to the left or to the right, the left-opening variant being the more common. The Victoria and Albert Museum records the pile of the Ardabil rug, the most examined rug in the world, in exactly this language: "asymmetrical knot open to the left."
One warning about the diagrams. Bahadır Öztürk's 2025 study finds that a good many drawings in Turkish sources render the symmetrical knot incorrectly, showing the crossing below the pile ends when it belongs above them. Some of what has been taught from textbooks for decades is drawn wrong.
Where the names came from, and why "Gördes" is a mistake
Rugs have been knotted in Anatolia for at least eight hundred years; the knots have had names for less than a hundred.
The spine of this article is a peer-reviewed paper by Bahadır Öztürk of the Dokuz Eylül University Faculty of Fine Arts, published in the journal Yedi (no. 33, 2025, pp. 163–176). Its finding is blunt: several of the most-used names in the field, Gördes and Senneh among them, are simply incorrect.
Öztürk's chronology runs like this. No formal name was attached to either knot type until the end of the nineteenth century. The first widely used pairing appears in 1916. The symmetrical–asymmetrical vocabulary shows up by 1922 and only becomes standard after the 1970s. "Turkish knot" is not a Seljuk term of art. It is a label coined in early twentieth-century Western rug literature, which does not by itself make it wrong — but it does say how recent, and how external, the naming is.
Gördes was never called "Ghiordium." Between 30 BC and AD 640 the town appears in the record as Iulia Gordos. Western writers heard a resemblance between "Ghiordes" and Gordion, the Phrygian capital, built a connection on that resemblance alone, and attached the rug knot to the legend of Alexander and the Gordian knot. The geography settles it: Gordion lies in the Polatlı district of Ankara, 330 kilometers (205 miles) from Gördes as the crow flies.
The second problem with the name is historical, and Ottoman production figures make it measurable. In 1884 Gördes wove 25,547 square meters of rug; Oushak wove 83,795 — more than three times as much. The scale of Oushak is documented further in Belleten: two thousand looms and eight thousand workers at the turn of the twentieth century, output rising from 75,000 to 250,000 meters between 1885 and 1896, and a single rug syndicate employing fifteen thousand people by 1910.
Nor was the difference only volume. An Ottoman report on the rug trade dated 1917, republished in the journal Arış, is sharper than that: Oushak work was known for its durability and was chosen for hotels, shops and staircases, while Gördes work was comparatively coarse and went mostly to the domestic market. A knot type, in other words, carries the name of a town that was neither the largest nor the finest producer of it.
"Senneh knot" is the worse name of the two
Not every Persian rug is tied asymmetrically, and neither is every rug from Senneh — Öztürk identifies a symmetrically knotted Senneh rug of 1880. A source from 1914 describes Shiraz rugs as woven usually with the Senneh knot and sometimes with the Gördes. Within Iran the choice varies by region and by workshop.
There is a further problem. Senneh, modern Sanandaj, lies inside Iran but is a Kurdish provincial center, and its people are not Persian. "Persian knot" therefore misdescribes the structure, the geography and the community at once. A third name that circulates in Turkish sources, the "physician's knot," has no basis whatever: surgeons use no single knot, and none of the ones they do use resembles the symmetrical knot.
Ottoman court rugs were tied with the Persian knot
This is the part that unsettles people, and the source is a Turkish scholar. Bekir Deniz of Ege University, writing in Sanat Tarihi Dergisi (XIV-1, 2005), describes the Ottoman court rugs as using silk, wool and cotton in warp and weft, wool and cotton in the knot, and — unlike Anatolian rugs — the Persian, or Senneh, knot. The same study records Oushak rugs as woven in wool with the Turkish knot.
Both techniques lived side by side inside Anatolia: symmetrical in the village weaving, asymmetrical in the court workshop. The name "Turkish knot" excludes the most magnificent rugs the Ottomans ever made.
Gördes knot vs Senneh knot, side by side
| Symmetrical (Gördes / Turkish knot) | Asymmetrical (Senneh / Persian knot) | |
|---|---|---|
| How it is tied | Wrapped around two warp threads; both ends drawn back up between the pair | Tied to two warps; one end comes up between them, the other passes behind a single warp |
| Handedness | None — the knot is mirrored | Opens left or right; left-opening is more common |
| Where it is woven | Most measured Anatolian rugs; also Shiraz and Heriz in Iran | Ottoman court workshops; much of Iran; Turkic weavers inside Iran |
| Museum terminology | "Symmetrical knot" | "Asymmetrical knot, open to the left / right" |
| Effect on drawing | No verifiable source supports either knot drawing finer detail. Resolution is set by knot density, not knot type. | |
| Effect on durability | No peer-reviewed study measures abrasion, pile loss or breaking strength by knot type in handmade rugs. | |
What has actually been measured in Anatolia
The figures below come from published measurements of real objects, mostly in Arış, the rug journal of the Atatürk Culture Center, and from university journals — not from the trade.
| Region | Knot | Measured density | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oushak, 16th c. (15 rugs, Ankara Vakıf Eserleri Museum) | Symmetrical | 17–21 × 21–26 per dm² | Özkavruk & İleri, Arış 7 (2012) |
| Oushak (Ayaş mosques) | Symmetrical | 30 × 30 per dm² | Arış 22 (2023) |
| Yağcıbedir (Sındırgı) | Symmetrical | 735–1,232 knots/dm² | Atiş, Arış 20-21 (2022) |
| Taşpınar (Aksaray) | Symmetrical | 1,750 knots/dm² average in a 1967 report; 30 × 35 today | Arış 10 (2014) |
| Hereke | Symmetrical | 10,000 knots/dm² in silk; 3,600 in wool | Demirarslan, Art-e 25 (2020) |
| Ladik (Konya) | Traditionally symmetrical; production has shifted to the asymmetrical knot | 40 × 50 per dm² | Karpuz, Arış 7 (2012) |
| Karapınar (Konya) | Symmetrical; all 28 examples wool | No figures published | Arış 5 (2011) |
Two things follow. The overwhelming majority of measured Anatolian rugs are symmetrically knotted, so the preference the name points at is real even where the name is not. And the tradition is not fixed. Emine Karpuz's field survey of Ladik documents a center where the symmetrical knot is called traditional and where weaving has nonetheless moved to the Persian knot; the warp there is now entirely cotton, and the weft wool a blend of New Zealand, Karaman and merino fleece. Which knot a rug carries depends on the year and the workshop, not on the map.
Is the symmetrical knot stronger?
It is asserted to be, in a Turkish official source, and the assertion has never been measured. The Ministry of National Education's vocational module on calculating rug quality states that rugs tied with the Turkish knot are more secure, because in the Senneh knot one end of the knot is left free; Karpuz reaches a similar judgment in the Ladik study, describing what is being given up as a sound knot form.
Neither is a textile-science measurement. No peer-reviewed study — in Turkish or in English — tests abrasion resistance, pile loss or breaking strength against knot type in a handmade rug. Turkish textile engineering has concentrated on machine-made goods. The claim can honestly be reported as the judgment of a training module and of fieldworkers. It cannot be reported as a finding. What does determine how a rug wears is better documented elsewhere: yarn quality, ply and twist, and how densely and evenly it was tied.
Museums, for their part, dropped the national names some time ago. Encyclopaedia Iranica treats the older terminology as a problem in itself, on the ground that both knot types are used throughout the Near and Middle East regardless of political borders or the language or ethnicity of the weavers. Öztürk arrives at the same place from the Turkish side: Turkic communities inside Iran used the asymmetrical knot, and the Iranian regions of Shiraz and Heriz used the symmetrical one. A knot belongs to a workshop tradition, not to a nation. When the MAK in Vienna mounted its rug exhibition in 2002–2003 it put the choice in the title: KNOTS SYMMETRIC_ASYMMETRIC.
"The question I hear most in the showroom is whether a rug is Turkish-knotted," says Mehmethan Özer of Halıcızade. "My answer now is that it is symmetrically knotted, yes, and that the name is a bad one — would you like to hear why. Most people are startled and then interested, because nobody has told them that the grandest Ottoman court rugs were tied with the Persian knot. We do not have to sell a rug on the nationality of its knot. We have truer and more interesting things to say about it."
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between the Turkish knot and the Persian knot?
The symmetrical knot, commonly called Turkish or Gördes, wraps two warp threads and brings both ends back up between that pair. In the asymmetrical knot, called Persian or Senneh, one end comes up between the two warps and the other passes behind a single warp, which gives the knot a left or right opening.
Why is the name "Gördes knot" considered wrong?
A peer-reviewed study published in the journal Yedi in 2025 traces the name to a false etymology. The historical name of Gördes is Iulia Gordos, not Ghiordium, and the Phrygian capital Gordion lies 330 kilometers away. Gördes also wove under a third of Oushak's output in 1884.
Which knot were Ottoman court rugs tied with?
The Persian, or Senneh, knot. Bekir Deniz, writing in Sanat Tarihi Dergisi, records that Ottoman court rugs were woven with the Persian knot, unlike Anatolian rugs generally, while Oushak rugs were woven in wool with the Turkish knot. Both techniques were in use in Anatolia at the same time.
Is the Turkish knot stronger than the Persian knot?
There is no measurement that says so. A Turkish vocational training module and some field studies assess it that way, but no peer-reviewed textile study tests abrasion, pile loss or breaking strength against knot type in handmade rugs. Yarn quality, ply, twist and knot density are the documented variables.
Does knot type determine how fine a pattern can be?
No verifiable source supports that distinction; it is a trade convention. What sets the resolution of a pattern is knot density rather than knot type. Encyclopaedia Iranica notes that the jufti knot, tied over more than two warps, lowers density and coarsens the drawing.
Can you tell where a rug was made from its knot?
Not reliably. Both knots are used across Türkiye and Iran, Shiraz and Heriz weave symmetrically, and Ottoman court workshops wove asymmetrically. A Turkish center such as Ladik has moved from one knot to the other within living memory, so the knot dates a workshop more usefully than it places one.
What do museums call the two knots?
Symmetrical and asymmetrical. The Victoria and Albert Museum describes the Ardabil rug as having an asymmetrical knot open to the left, and the MAK in Vienna titled its 2002 exhibition KNOTS SYMMETRIC_ASYMMETRIC. National names have largely been dropped from catalog records.
Related reading: the anatomy of a rug · what knot density actually measures · hand-knotted rugs · Oushak rugs · Hereke rugs · Yağcıbedir rugs