The patio is covered with fine brown dust, the surrounding walls crumble and the chipped plaster is the same monotonous khaki color as the floor. Suddenly, a splattered paint that lifts a nearby wall screams, shakes his metal palette and throws himself at it. Beneath a thick layer of straw and mud, a faded but distinct matrix of blue, green and yellow summary motifs emerge, a trace of the dazzling shapes and colors that once made this courtyard dance in the twinkling sun.
I oppose the wall with Hamid Mazaheri and Mehrdad Moslemzadeh, the two Iranian artist-entrepreneurs who repair this personal apartment to restore its former splendor. When these mosaics were still vibrant, Isfahan larger than London, more cosmopolitan than Paris and bigger, according to For Some, than even the mythical Istanbul. Elegant bridges crossed its modest river, abundant polo players rushed to the world’s largest square, and lots of domes and minarets dotted the horizon. Europeans, Turks, Indians and Chinese flocked to the brilliant Persian court, amid a vast empire stretching from the Uphrates in what is now Iraq to the Oxus River in Afghanistan. In the 17th century, the city’s wealth and grandeur encouraged the rhyming proverb, Isfahan nesf-e jahan, or “Isfahan is part of the world. “
After a brutal siege that broke that golden age in the early eighteenth century, new leaders nevertheless moved the capital to Tehran, leaving Isfahan languishing like a provincial marigot, which also left intact many of the monuments of the Old City. explore for months without coming through it, ” marveled British traveller Robert Byron on his 1933-1934 journey through Asia. This art, he writes in The Road to Oxiana,” ranks Isfahan among the rarest places, such as Athens or Rome, which are humanity’s unusual refreshment. “
Today, however, the city is basically known as the site of Iran’s first nuclear studies facility. What was once a quiet city has become the third largest metropolis in the country, surrounded by spraying suburbs, dying factories and sweltering traffic of more than 3 million people. Nothing symbolizes Iran’s bewildering modernity more than the Launch in February of a satellite called Omid (Hope). In Islam, however, hope is a commodity in sharp decline. The sublime urban landscape that survived the invasions of Afghan tribes and Mongol looters is now threatened by forgetfulness and reckless urban development.
Mazaheri and Moslemzadeh are components of a new generation of ispahanis that need to repair not only the buildings, but also the reputation of their city as Persian Florence, who hope that one day it will seduce Westerners with their wonders. The space that is its current purpose, the newly painted white stucco ceiling is blysized fromstone stalactites. Delicate golden roses frame a work of art from idyllic gardens. (Paradis is a Persian word meaning “closed garden”). On a central fireplace, loads of built-in mirrors reflect the sweetness of the courtyard. “I love this job,” says Safouva Saljoughi, a young art student dressed in a chador who prints a portrait of faded flowers on a corner of the room. “I have a special date with those places. “
The space would possibly have been built in the 17th century through a wealthy merchant or a successful government official, and then transformed to suit changing tastes over the next two centuries. Even the chimney sign has the sensitive shape of a peacock. “Orner and paintings together, ” said Mazaheri in a hesitant Englishman. Located a few steps from the medieval mosque on Friday, the space is classically Iranian design: a central courtyard surrounded by rooms on two sides, a singles front in the third and two giants. Floor reception with giant floor-to-ceiling windows in the room.
Saddam Hussein’s rocket attacks in Iraq in the early 1980s emptied this old community and space suffered serious acts of vandalism. As Moslemzadeh guides Saljoughi’s meticulous recovery effort, Mazaheri nods to the large holes in the reception room, which once spaced stained glass windows with oak frames that bathed the inside of a rainbow. in bright colors. ” There are still some teachers in Isfahan who can rebuild such windows,” he said. The undeniable solution of the elaborate stucco roof took more than a year for five scaffolding professionals.
Trained as a specialist in conservation techniques, the lean, lively Mazaheri, 38, says he has built a recovery business that tackles everything from ancient ruins to 17th-century murals. Together with his colleague Moslemzadeh, he was 43 years old and studied art. Conservation in St. Petersburg, Russia, invest their time and profits to turn this ruined space into a tea room where visitors can enjoy the classical craftsmanship, music and art of Ispahani. Like many Ispahanis I know, foreigners are welcome, refreshingly open and immensely proud of their heritage. Without a shred of irony or discouragement, Mazaheri looks around the reception room half-finished and says, “It would possibly take another five years to finish repairing this place. “
The story of Isfahan is an epic cycle of fabulous boom and calamitous crisis. Here, a road that crosses the Iranian plateau east of the Mesopotamian plain encounters a path connecting the Caspian Sea to the north with the Persian Gulf to the south. The fate of the city for merchants, pilgrims and armies passing through it. With delicious weather, the city is at approximately the same altitude as Denver and has mild summers, Isfahan has become a bustling city at the crossroads of ancient Persia.
A taxi driver, examining his Persian-English dictionary as he detours through heavy traffic, gives me to sell a gold statue that he says is 5,000 years old. I’d be surprised if it was authentic, especially since those ancient artifacts are still elusive, making it difficult to pin down the precise moment when Isfahan has become an urban center. What little has been discovered about the city’s remote afterlife I see in the basement of the Office of Cultural Heritage, a perfectly restored 19th-century villa just down the road from the Mazaheri and Moslemzadeh project. Some stone tool boxes rest on a tile floor, and a dozen ceramic pieces, one of which has a wriggling snake, rest on a plastic tabletop. Just a few kilometers from the city, on the wisest of a towering hill, are the unexcavated ruins of a temple, possibly built by the Sassanid Empire that ruled the domain until the Arab conquest in the 7th century AD. C. JC In the city itself, Italian archaeologists excavating beneath the Friday Mosque just before the 1979 Islamic Revolution discovered Sassanid-style columns, hinting that the site may have originally been a Zoroastrian chimney temple.
The city’s first recorded golden age dates back to the arrival of the Selycidal Turks of Central Asia in the 11th century, who made it their capital and built a magnificent square leading to an expanded Friday mosque adorned with two domes. The mosque – opposite Mecca – is getting bigger, it is the north dome that has astonished pilgrims for a thousand years. Looking at the most sensible 20 meters on the sidewalk, I feel a delicious and unforeseen vertigo, the best balance of concord in motion. “Every element, like a trained athlete’s muscles, plays their service with rated precision,” Byron writes.
Unlike St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome or St Paul’s Cathedral in London, there are no hidden chains that hold any of the domes in place; The architects relied solely on their mathematical and engineering skills. Meticulous research of the northern dome in the 1990s revealed that it was accurate, not only for the 11th century, but even through current standards. The land), this elegant design could possibly have been influenced or even designed through one of Persia’s most prominent poets, Omar Khayyum, who was invited to Isfahan in 1073 to take over the sultan’s observatory. a brilliant scientist who wrote a founding e-book on algebra, reformed the calendar and would have shown that the sun was the formula of the middle of the sun 500 years before Copernicus.
Alpay Ozdural, a Turkish architect who taught at the Eastern Mediterranean University until his death in 2005, believed Khayyum had played a key role in aligning and building the dome in 1088-89, creating what amounts to a mathematical brick song. (Although many scholars are skeptical of this theory, Ozdural stated that an attractive clue can be discovered in a verse of Khayyum’s poetry: “My good appearance is rare, my body is only to see, as big as a cypress, blooming like a tulip; And yet I don’t know why the hand of fate sent me to adorn this dome of earth’s emotion. “) Only 3 years after the final touch of the dome, the sultan died, the observatory closed, the reformed calendar abolished and Khayyum, who had little patience with Islamic orthodoxy, left Isfahan forever.
More than a century later, in 1228, Mongolian troops arrived, saving architecture but putting a large population on the sword. The city has deteriorated and fighting has broken out between rival Sunni sects. “Isfahan is one of the largest and most charming cities,” the Arab traveller Ibn Battuta wrote on his scale in 1330. “But most of them are now in ruins. “Two generations later, in 1387, Central Asian conqueror Tamerlan overdue a revolt in Isfahan massacring 70,000 people. The buildings remained intact, but Tamerlán’s men added their own macabre monument in the shape of a skull tower.
It would be another two centuries before Isfahan, under the reign of Shah Abbas I, resurrected the greatest ruler of the Safavid empire (1501-1722 d. C. ). Cruel as Ivan the Terrible of Russia, cunning as Elizabeth I of England and extravagant as Philip II of Spain (all contemporaries), Abbas has made Isfahan his showcase; Transformed the provincial city into a global metropolis, a vital Armenian merchant and craftsman and home to Catholic priests and Protestant merchants. communities that had lived there for centuries. More notably, Abbas sought to identify Isfahan as the political capital of the first Shia empire, bringing academic theologians from Lebanon to the city’s devotees, a movement initiated through its predecessors that would have profound consequences on global history. The arts flourished in the new capital; miniaturists, carpet tters, jewelers and potters turned out to be ornamental pieces that advanced the mansions and palaces that rose along the wide avenues.
Abbas a kind of extreme. A European guest described him as a leader whose temperament can temporarily pass from joy to “that of a rabid lion. “Abbas’s appetites were legendary: he had a huge cellar and a harem with lots of women and more than two hundred children. His true love, however, power. He blinded his father, brother and two sons, and then killed a third son, whom he feared as a political threat, passing the throne on to a grandson.
Abbas almost illiterate, but no one is stupid. He is said to have personally softened a candle for prominent artist Reza Abbasi while drawing. Abbas can simply hunt, bleach and cook his own fish and game. He enjoyed exploring TheFahan Markets, eating freely at the stalls, wearing shoes that would suit him well and chatting with whoever he wanted. “To do so is to be king,” he said indignant Augustin priests who accompanied him on one of his escapes. “Not like yours, it’s still sitting inside!”
During the latter part of his 42-year ordinary reign, which ended with his death in 1629, Abbas left an urban landscape that rivaled or exceeded everything that had been created in a single reign in Europe or Asia. French archaeologist and architect André Godard, who lived in Iran in the early 20th century, wrote that Isfahan d’Abbas “is first and foremost a plan, with lines, masses and panoramic perspectives, a magnificent concept born a century before Versailles. “By the mid-17th century, the plan had been carried out in a city of 600,000 inhabitants, 163 mosques, 48 devoted schools, 1,801 department stores and 263 public baths. The sublime main street was 50 meters wide, with a canal in the middle, which filled the splattered onyx basins. with rose heads and shaded through two rows of Chinese trees. The gardens adorned the pavilions, which covered both sides of the dance called Chahar Bagh. “The Greats stretched out, sculpting with their numerous trains, striving to overcome themselves in r-splendor and generosity,” said a visiting European.
This ostentatious intake came to an abrupt end nearly a century later, when an Afghan army besathed the city for six long months in 1722. Women sold their pearls and jewellery until even gemstones simply could not buy bread. Cannibalism followed. An estimated 80,000 other people have died, most of them hungry. Afghans left most of the city intact, but this trauma, which later followed the capital’s move to Tehran to the north, destroyed the city’s prestige and prosperity.
“Bush well!” Isfahani said about twenty years ago as he joined me on a park bench in the middle of Naqsh-e Jahan Square. It is Friday morning, the Muslim Saturday, and the vast rectangular area is quiet, unless it is because of the noise of the fountains. Of the other young people I know here, my partner complains about emerging inflation, government corruption and devout interference in politics. He is also afraid of an American invasion. ” We are satisfied that Saddam is gone,” he added. “But we don’t, you need me to like Iraq. ” A math student with few job prospects, he dreams of seeking fortune in Dubai, Australia or New Zealand.
Four centuries ago, this square, also called Maidan, the economic and political center of a disgustingly rich and largely nonviolent empire that attracted foreigners from all over the world. “Let me take you to the Maidan,” thomas Herbert wrote, secretary of the British ambassador at the court of Persia from 1627 to 1629, which is “probably as spacious, delicious and fragrant as any other in the universe. “Measuring from 656 feet to 328 feet, it is also one of the largest urban squares in the world.
But unlike giant concrete spaces such as Tiananmen Square in Beijing or Red Square in Moscow, Naqsh-e Jahan served alternately and infrequently as a market, polo field, social gathering point, functional floor and festival park. and vendors sold Venetian glass in one corner and Indian fabrics or Chinese silks in another, while locals sold firewood, iron utensils or melons grown with pigeon droppings collected in special towers surrounding the city. goods in several languages and street vendors worked among the crowd.
A mast in the middle was used for archery: a rider galloped over it, then turned to knock down an apple, silver plate or gold cup on top. Marble poles that still remain at each end of the square recall the fierce polo shirt. parties in which the shah on a richly ornate mountain joined other dresses with fantastic colors and ambitious plumage.
Today, sand, merchants, street vendors and polo players are gone, domesticated through the gardens of the early twentieth century, but the view around the square remains noticeably unchanged. To the north is a giant arch that opens to the vaulted ceilings of a winding covered market stretching for nearly a mile. To the south is the Imam Mosque, a mountain of colorful bricks and shingles. Face to face on the east and west sides of the square are the Sheikh Lotf-Allah Mosque, with its brown color and pale blue dome, and Ali Qapu Palace. This design, rejected by Byron as a “brick shoe box”, is topped by thin columns that make it a royal grandstand; Bright silk curtains were once hung from above to block the sun. The two mosques bend at an angle to orient themselves towards Mecca, saving the square from an uncompromising order, while the two-story arcades for department stores outline and unify the whole.
On the other hand, my first impression of Chahar Bagh Drive, which is west of Maidan, is tinged with panic than tranquility. Unable to locate a taxi, I jumped to the back of a motorcycle driven by a middle-aged Ispahani that beckoned me as we moved from one car to another in traffic jams, I worry about being cut off. The structure of a new subway tunnel under historic street has blocked a traffic lane. , threatens to suck water from the river, shake the sensitive foundations and damage the fountains that decorate the old promenade.
Frustrated by traffic jams, my driving force veers off the road and heads to a central road, avoiding pedestrians walking unhindered through the park. But flashes of stilettos and henna hair, and sublime dresses for sale in boutiques with neon lights that long ago replaced sublime pavilions, speak of Ispahanis’ enduring fashion sense.
On the way back, we rushed to a new giant buying groceries and complex with a trendy skyscraper. In 2005, officials from the United Nations Education, Science and Culture Organization (Unesco) warned that unless construction is reduced, neighboring Maidan could simply lose his prestige as a World Heritage Site. City officials eventually cut off two floors of the offending tower, but its unpleasant presence still annoys many residents.
Heading north towards the Friday mosque, we arrive at the bustling Atiq Square (old), full of small street vendors. My motorcycle engine leaves me on the sidewalk and, with typical Iranian hospitality, approaches before I can thank you. or tip him.
The square is part of Seljuk Square built in the eleventh century, but over time the houses and have invaded its original borders. Now, city officials plan to demolish what they call “unauthorized structures,” repair the original trapezoidal plane, and leave the domain around the mosque blank. This proposal has divided Isfahan’s cultural heritage network. The square is “dirty now,” says a village official. You need to demolish homes and outlets and open designer boutiques.
Such a speech annoys Abdollah Jabal-Ameli, retired president of the city’s Cultural Heritage Organization and renowned architect who helped repair the Maidan. “You have to have a biological vision,” he tells me. Since there is little space left in the original square,” says Jabal-Ameli, annihilating the houses and growing around them over the last millennium would be a mistake. “But there are new forces at stake,” he says.
The new Jabal-Ameli fortresses come not only with city officials, but also with developers who need to build a 54-story skyscraper hotel and grocery mall just outside the historic district. Isfahan’s deputy mayor, Hussein Jafari, says foreign tourists need hip, stress-free hotels that would be far enough away from the city center to escape Unesco’s wrath. At the same time, he says, the city government intends to save the thousands of ruined houses. “We can do both,” insists Jafari. .
“We are able to invite foreign investors to turn those spaces into hotels, classic restaurants and tea rooms for tourists,” says Farhad Soltanian, a cultural heritage manager working in the Armenian quarter. Soltanian takes me down the newly paved alley of a century-old Catholic church, recently restored thanks to an unlikely alliance between the Vatican and the Iranian government. On the next street, staff gave the finishing touches to a giant solar space that once separated the Armenian clergy and is now restored with personal funds. The owners expect the mansion, with its 30 freshly painted rooms, to attract foreign tourists and pay for their investment.
On the day of my departure, Mazaheri and Moslemzadeh invite me to be their guest in a classic dining room at the Maidan. Isfahan mocks his reputation for being wise but stingy, but they are also famous for their fabulous banquets. As far back as 1330, Ibn Battuta noted that “they always tried to outdo themselves by purchasing sumptuousarray meats. preparations for which they are deploying all their resources. “
Turns out not much has changed. In the shadow of the Imam Mosque and bathed by the soothing sounds of classical music, we crossed our legs on large benches and dined in dizi, a complex Persian dish of soup, bread, lamb and vegetables served with a giant mallet used for stained glass windows clean red and blue throughout the room. Despite economic hardship, intractable policies and even the risk of war, anything about Isfahan’s ability to cling stubbornly to his traditions is also evident.
Andrew Lawler lives in Maine and writes about archaeology for the Smithsonian. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is an award-winning photographer of Iraqi descent founded in Beirut.
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Andrew Lawler is from The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke. He is also editor of science magazine and has written for the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Smithsonian, National Geographic and other publications Website: andrewlawler. com