Central Iran

Before I traveled to Abyaneh and Natanz, and then further to Esfahan, I visited, for a couple of days, Kashan, another 100 kilometers south of Qom. It is the first oasis along the old Qom-Kerman road, a small desert city at the border to the Great Desert. It has been home of ancient settlements since at least the 5th Millennium BC. Legend has it that the Three Wise Men, who were in fact Zoroastrian Magis, set out from here to follow a star announcing the birth of the New King of the Jews, the baby Jesus in Bethlehem. (But how did the bones arrive in Cologne’s Dome then?) Kashan is very famous for rose water which is made here from the beautiful flowers blooming at the fringes of Dasht-e Kavir.



On the southern outskirts of the city an amazing ziggurat is located which might be older than those in Mesopotamia. It is what is now called Tappeh-ye Seyalk, a famous destination for archaeologists, and tourists, as well. It might well have been the starting point of any Persian civilization, and even religion at large.





The Tappeh-ye Seyalk ziggurat, built in 2900 BC, is one of four Elamite religious structures located in what is now modern Iran. The other three are the Susa zigurrat, about 4000 years old, the Haft Tappeh and the enormous Choqa Zanbil, both from the 13th and 14th Century BC. Those are located in the Khuzestan province at the western border. Another important ziggurat is, of course, that one in Babylon, the famous Tower of Babel in the Holy Bible.

The word Paradise has its origin in Farsi, and Fin Garden, not far away from Tappeh-ye Seyalk, is a wonderful example for the idea of a Persian garden resembling paradise. Close by is the Shahzadeh-ye Ibrahim shrine with its conical, tilted roof, which is so typical for this part of the country, its two colorful minarets and a quiet courtyard.








Not far from the city center, Kashan’s finest Islamic complex and its largest mosque and madraseh, Masjed-e Agha Bozorg, is a pretty humble building with a simple dome and marvelous minarets. When entering the beautiful portal, the sunken courtyard is noticed.







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lady Shatita

Image
In order to learn more about Shi’a Islam and the piety of ordinary people it would have been most helpful to visit at least some of the plenty of Emamzadehs (holy sites) all over Iran. So, it was a most welcome opportunity and, in fact, great honor when my Kuwaiti friends invited me to accompany them on their several bus trips in Khorasan on the occasion of their 2006 pilgrimage to the Holy City of Mashhad. Achaemenid, Parthian, and Sasanian Empires each embraced half of the then known world when they climaxed. And even when Iran was under the reign of Seleucids, Arabs, Seljuks, or Mongols, the Iranians imprinted their lifestyle and culture on the non-welcome invaders, who in any sense immensely benefited. So, the austere new religion Islam, which replaced Iran’s state religion Zoroastrianism, was fundamentally reorganized, and, as I see it as an outsider, filled with life. The rapid and shocking decline of the Sasanid Empire at the end of a century-long fight with Byzantium, and the ...
Read more

Persianization

Image
Kuwait’s Arab Times had attracted my attention to Esfahan’s gorgeous Great Mosque in an article in 2003. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find so far a webpage of the article which praised the wonders of Iran’s largest mosque and one of the most significant and finest buildings of the Islamic world. I visited the site the first time at my second trip to Esfahan in late spring of 2004. I took some pictures in the vast courtyard, soaked the peaceful atmosphere there, and watched the few visitors from Iran and elsewhere. I had forgotten about the many details of the article and faintly had read some of the notes in my travel guide. My second visit in late 2007 was driven by scientific interest. I had recently posted (at Freelance ) my rather amateurish studies and thoughts about a suggested ‘conceptual breakthrough’ in Islamic architecture and art in the late 15th century, i.e., quasi-crystalline tessellations, which had led to world-wide attention due to its publication in the Science magazine...
Read more

Buyid Architecture in Esfahan

Image
Older than what is now visible in Esfahan’s Great Mosque (although the first mosque there was built in the 7th century) is what has remained of the Jurjir Mosque . The fragmentary façade of the Jurjir Mosque had been discovered during restoration work at Masjed-e Hakim in 1955. The fragment had been hidden for centuries behind a mud wall. The beautiful Hakim mosque itself is a Safavid mosque from the 17th century. The Jurjir façade is the only remains of a 10th century mosque which was commissioned by the Buyid (Buwayhid) vizier Al-Sahib ibn Abbad (d. 995), a Mutazilite scholar. The Buyid Dynasty, who ruled in Iraq and Iran, effectively brought the Abbasids era in Baghdad to an end. Although the Abbasids retained the caliphate, they were deprived of all secular power. Buyids were originally Zaydi, or Fiver Shi'as. They later began to lean closer to the nowadays dominating Twelver Shi'a branch of Islam. In general tolerant in religious matters, the Buyid rulers in Baghdad even ...
Read more