Heriz is 75 kilometres east of Tabriz to the west and South of Sabalan. Heriz is the biggest and most important of the thirty town and villages of the area which include Gerovan, Mehraban, Bakhshaiash.
Agriculturally it is not important; however, it has a prosperous carpet weaving industry.
Weaving has been carried out since the beginning of the nineteenth century or possibly before that.
Bakhshaish is the village where weaving has been going on the longest.
It is believed that since few very old pieces from Heriz area exist the weaving industry is a comparatively modern development.
Bilverdi is one of the villages in the area which weave the design but the only one that does it in single weft. The quality of these pieces are not very good.
During the last quarter of the nineteenth century when the supply of antique carpets that the bazaar merchants of Tabriz were exporting to the west was running short; the bazaar merchants sent the Tabriz carpet designs to Gerovan, Bakhshaish and Heriz to be woven. However because these weavers were incapable of weaving curvilinear lines they produced the designs in horizontal lines. Hence the Heriz or Gerovan design. In this area they do not use cartoons nor is the design called out to them. All size carpets are woven from a design on a cloth.
Under the control of foreign management firms, Heriz carpets from the late 19th Century became standardized, and carpet designs were increasingly prepared using graph paper cartoons, carpet samples and more variation in patterns.
