A new series
I've just posted a series of the Iranian city of Isfahan, which was such a great place to spend a week doing street and architectural photography. You can wander around the old buildings, so many of them devoid of other tourists. I happily spent perhaps an hour alone in the north dome-chamber of the Friday Mosque, throwing my lens cap at the pigeons nesting in the crevices (sorry pigeons) to get a shot of them flying out the windows. But plenty of people are around, should you care for crowds, and so many were happy to hang around with a tourist.
Before I reached Isfahan, I brushed up by reading journals of past travellers who had passed through previously. Older journals are always interesting, even if many were invested with prejudices less commonly found in contemporary times (more on that later). Some of the better ones follow. Hopefully it adds something to the photographs. There's a bit of a European bias - only because it's tougher to get a hold of good translations of non-European histories and journals.
Door under the south ayvan (archway) of the meydan, Isfahan.
Ibn Battuta
Ibn Battuta, the great Moroccan traveller, who went on the hajj and ended up in China, visited Isfahan in 1326. He said it was “one of the largest and fairest of cities, but the greater part of it is now in ruins, as a result of the feud between Sunnis and Shi’ites, which is still raging there.” He didn’t go into the fine details of the feud (at least not in my translation of his book); but other sources point to a declaration by Khan Oljeitu that Shi’ism was the official religion of the Ilkhanate. At the time, Isfahan was ruled by the Mongolian-descended Ilkhanate, based in Tabriz. Its ruler, Oljeitu, had sampled a few other of the major religions before permanently converting to Shi’ism in 1310 - he had been baptised, he may have flirted with the Buddhism of his dynastic forebears, and had previously declared himself a Sunni. Oljeitu eventually withdrew his edict after his Sunni subjects (including those in Isfahan) rioted.
Ibn Battuta went on to describe the people of Isfahan as “goodlooking, with clear white skins tinged with red, exceedingly brave, generous, and always trying to outdo one another in procuring luxurious viands [foods]”. But he was more enamoured with Shiraz, which he visited next, to which he devoted much more time and ink. Unlike Isfahan, Shiraz had been spared the devastation wrought by the Mongols during their conquests in the 13th century, and it may have been in a much better state.
Coffeeshop, Isfahan. Good stuff, and all your modern needs catered for, including aeropress, filter and syphon.
Giosafat Barbaro
The Venetian, Barbaro, visited Isfahan in 1474, and like Ibn Battuta, arrived in the wake of conflict. In around 1453, Jahan Shah of the Qara Qoyunulu, a Turkic dynasty also based out of Tabriz, had brutally put down a rebellion in the city. Barbaro passed on the story he had been told as follows (I’ve cleaned up the more archaic English a little bit):
“…one GIANSA [Jahan Shah] being King of Persia, came to this town to reduce the same to obedience, and having taken order with them, departed. But shortly after they rebelled again; whereupon he sent an army thither with [a] commandment, that when they had sacked and burned the town, every man at his return should bring one of the inhabitants’ heads with him: which they fulfilled so exactly that (as I have heard some of them report which were in that army) [those who] could not get mens heads, cut off women’s heads and shaved them, to fulfill the king's commandment."
Interior of an Armenian Church (Vank Church, I think), in Julfa, south of the river in Isfahan.
Jean-Baptiste Tavernier
Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who visited Isfahan several times during the 17th century, noted the “loads of odour and carcasses of dead beasts, which cause a most filthy stench.” In fairness, he may well have had equal cause to complain about the odour of, say, 17th century Paris. He remarked on people watering the sidewalks in summer to stop it from being kicked up (as many do now, even in the nation's terrible water crisis). A merchant by trade (he brought what became the Hope Diamond to Europe), he devoted several pages to Isfahan's markets and shops; as well as how to choose the best room in one of the city’s inns. It seems he found Isfahan less impressive than previous European travellers, ending his account by saying:
“this is all that can be said of Isfahan, and that great Piazza, which some perhaps have set out in better colours. But I have represented all things as they are, as being one that have seen them oftner, and beheld them a longer time than ever any Frank that travelled into Asia.”
Isfahan's main square, looking south, with the city's southern hills as a backdrop.
Arthur Arnold
Arthur Arnold, the British politician who visited in the 1870s, seems to have caught Isfahan in one of its ebbs. Remarking on the city's pigeon towers, which collect guano to fertilise crops, he said “like everything else in Persia, these towers are falling into decay; and there are but few pigeons. Time was when there were many, and when the melon growers of Ispahan paid a considerable rent for each tower.” He chided the Persians for failing to maintain many of the city’s old buildings, but was rather taken with the Zayanderud river. Now, most of the buildings are now quite well restored, but they have, sadly, let the river go.
The Persian architectural style did not speak to Arnold; of the Chehel Sotoun (the Royal Pavilion) he said it was “an admixture of the barbaric and the tawdry, which, together with the unsubstantial character of the buildings, are the usual characteristics of Persian architecture”. Also, seems Arnold did not have the best of times in the company of Iranians - he had worse opinions reserved for the people - and to him, the Persians fit into those 19th century "Oriental" tropes - unintellectual, incapable of abstract thought, selfish, barbarous, and generally less civilised than their European counterparts. As I said earlier, prejudices from different times.
Praying at Isfahan's Friday (Jameh) Mosque.
Robert Byron
Then there is Byron, whose journal was published as The Road to Oxiana. Byron was an architecture buff, and unlike Arnold, was absolutely taken by Isfahan. He was right to single out three places to praise – the north chamber of the Friday (Jameh) Mosque, the city's marvellous footbridges, and the dome-chamber of the Sheikh Lutfullah Mosque.
Dome of the Sheikh Lutfullah Mosque.
On the latter, he nails its brilliance:
“[the mosque] hides any symptom of construction or dynamic form beneath a mirage of shallow curved surfaces … form there is and must be, but how it is created, and what supports it, are questions of which the casual eye is unconscious, as it is meant to be, lest its attention should wander from the pageant of colour and pattern … I have never encountered splendour of this kind before. Other interiors came into my mind as I stood there, to compare it with: Versailles, or the porcelain rooms at Schonbrunn, or the Doge’s Palace, or St Peter’s. All are rich; but none so rich. Their richness is three-dimensional; it is attended by all the effort of shadow. In the Mosque of Sheikh Lutfullah, it is a richness of light and surface, of pattern and colour only. The architectural form is unimportant. It is not smothered, as in rococo; it is simply the instrument of spectacle, as earth is the instrument of a garden. And then I suddenly thought of that unfortunate species, modern interior decorators, who imagine they can make a restaurant, or a cinema, or a plutocrat’s drawing-room look rich if given money enough for gold leaf and looking-glass. They little know what amateurs they are. Nor, alas, do their clients.”
One side of the Sheikh Lutfullah Mosque's dome-chamber.
Somewhere else, in the many, many pages he devotes to this one dome, he throws in the word “swims”. Can you see what he was getting at? To be standing in what is ultimately a smallish room, with one small door, and a few little windows, surrounded on all sides by thousands of tonnes of brickwork and to feel the lightness of swimming? To see the form of a building with your eyes but somehow not to feel the weight of any of it? He raved about the place, and rightly so.
English translations of the journals are all well out of copyright and freely available at archive.org (just search the author's name).