Salmiya

The noble people of Yazd had been described already by Marco Polo who passed the city in 1272 CE on his way to China. Yazd is a typical desert city in Iran, located at the eastern fringes of the Dasht-e Lut , the frightening salt desert, one of the hottest and most hostile areas on Earth. So, end of November was the right season to go to Yazd (and other cities in Iran as well). Temperatures were generally mild and sun was shining. The old city of Yazd is a labyrinth with narrow lanes bordered by high mud walls. Even the locals admit that they are getting lost every now and then and have to ask their neighbors. A nice taroof , of course. You might see the tall minarets of the famous Timurid Friday Mosque as a landmark, but you’ll never really approach it. The center of the old city is represented by a small square with trees and benches. A very peaceful place. You may rest here and read in your travel guide about near-by Alexander’s prison, who passed the city after he had ransacked and...

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...

The old Dardasht quarter near Esfahan’s Friday mosque hides another gem caught in time. The stunning Islamic art with an incredible degree of complexity has fascinated the West for a long time. Beautiful mosaics cover the dome, the minarets and the pillars of mosques. It was hold that the strict geometric star-and-polygon ornaments in, what is called in the West medieval, Islamic architecture was conceived as a network of zigzagging lines where the lines were drafted directly with a straightedge and a compass. Henri Stierlin writes in his monumental work about Islamic Art and Architecture (2002) about decorations of the Timurid era: "The determination of this splendour-loving dynasty to give religious buildings a special grandeur and lustre led to rivalry between architects as to who would produce the most perfect work, the design that was most unified while fully exploiting a variety of motifs, and a multiplicity of techniques including brick, glazed surfaces, mosaics, pierced s...