Esfahan the glorious

Competing with Istanbul for elegance and beauty, Esfahan in the 16^th C was the jewel of the Savafids in their Golden Age under Shah Abbas I. Abbas forcibly translocated Armenian Christain merchants and their extensive trading networks to run the state silk monoply. Jews were already running the banking system and he developed a reliable tax system that gave him the resources to create a standing army to suppress tribal squabbles and push back Ottoman and Turkic incursions. He imported craftsmen to build some wonderful monuments in Esfahan, his new capital.

Internal dome of new Friday Mosque

The New Friday Mosque used the same dome over a cube as Shapur and Adashir in their Sassanian palaces and as the Zoroastrians before that. For the Zoroastrians, the cube represented the earth, the dome represented the sky and there was always a pool of water before the entrance. Persia thus modified the plain Arabic mosque and gave it architectural grandeur, incorporating minarets to balance the mass of the high outer dome. The New Mosque has an inner dome 30M across and the outer dome rises 57M covered in the trademark turquoise tiles. The inside dome has a marvelous decoration of tiles and acts as a reverberation membrane for a mullah who stands under its apex to project his voice to the furtherest corners of the open mosque square beyond the cube. When we visited, the outdoor part of the mosque was being covered with shade-cloth to protect the congregation. A young mullah took us aside and answered questions about himself and his religion.

Ladies Mosque with the peacock's tail of light

The Ladies Mosque, built for the women of his court and not open to the public of the time, is even more jaw-droppingly exquisite. It was given to the Shah’s respected father-in-law, who developed a theological school there.

Opposite the enormous Imam Square, from which the mosques are entered, is a gorgeous formal reception pavillion and gardens, called the many-pillared. A wide reflecting pool, perhaps 100M long, leads up through a shady and extensive garden of trees of various textures to a pavillion where the Shah sat to receive his guests. As we have seen the fashion, 20 dressed tree trunks became pillars, perhaps 20M high, to support a wide and deep flat roof – an impressive verandah. The royal area had been extensively decorated with mirror-work, now destroyed. Behind the façade is a large reception room, painted with 17^th C frescoes in brilliant colours. These had been covered over with plaster later in the same century to protect them f

Shah Abbass reception hall

rom marauding and iconoclastic Afghans, and were only rediscovered by accident 50 years ago. The frescoes are a cross between Italian renaissance and Persian minaturist styles, where Italian idioms of individual personalities and perspective are married with exquisite detail of costume and colour. The Persians developed a new way of painting that gave them several days to work on a section of damp plaster compared to the Italians who had to work very quickly and therefore more impressionistically. Blue, black, white, grey, red & white and orange horses gallop across a field with the Shah leading the charge in a famous battle.

The Shah's renaissance battle

On the other wall, the court of Shah Abbas I is shown in its power and decadence, whereas his son’s court, receiving a supplication from Humayun (a Mughal Emperor on the run), is shown as formal and correct. The son commissioned all the paintings, of course. Below these grand frescoes are small wall paintings of familiar romances and stories in minaturist style.

The Armenian church of Joseph of Arimathea is unprepossessing on the outside but is covered with brightly coloured murals of gospel stories on the inside. The small museum offers gruesome documentation on the genocide of Turkish Armenians and some wonderful illuminated bibles in Armenian script. On the other side of the river the 2000 or so remaining Jews use a private house as their synagoue although one old synagogue we visited still had services every morning followed by breakfast. The rabbi and the Armenian priest divide their time with Tehran where they represent their minority in parliament. Underneath the arches of Shah Abbas’s bridge is cool and has good acoustics. They are a gathering place for reading or contemplation, family picnics and for singers, such as the several men, young and old, who sang for their and our pleasure this morning. A lovely city, but dependent on snow-melt and good water management and therefore fragile in the face of climate change. The Esfahanis are without any water in their river this summer for the first time ever because it has been siphoned off upstream to send to Yazd and to service two large steel mills. Without water, this city of gardens and fountains will die.