The Iranian New Year 2570 begins (in London) on Sunday 21st March at 23.21 (click here for times in other places) Happy New Year everyone! Happy Norooz! Just in case you’re not up to speed, here’s a great 47 second ‘History for Dummies’ video guide to Norooz. Even if you dont understand any Persian, you …
Shah ‘Abbās the First was a famously itinerant ruler: travelling up to a annual maximum of 4500km (in 1591-2 – and that’s not counting his prodigious hunting trips). On each of his average-thirty-odd annual moves, Melville has calculated that the Shah generally covered 34-45 km/day. ‘Abbās could, however, travel much faster: Pietro della Valle wrote …
The earliest known portraits of Iranians by Westerners reached record prices in the October 2010 Christies sales: £157,250 for a 1604 drawing of “Mehdi Quli Bey”; and £229,250 for a 1604 drawing of “Sinal Shah Kamlu”, with his even more extravagant mustachios (against estimates of £35-50,000). Click on the links to see what you might …
The first of the images of Shah Abbas the Great shown here is an undated and unpublished portrait in a private collection. If its provenance can be confirmed, it is a unique and important representation: especially since it was apparently painted from life, and by an Italian artist. Abbas does indeed look very like John …
When Shah Abbas set out from Daulatabad with the “six hundred handsome young men” witnessed by Muratowicz, the first stop properly outside Isfahan on the thousand kilometre walk (in 1601) was at Ribat Qazi Ahmad. Melville couldn’t find this ribat (fort) on the War Office Quarter-Inch maps he worked with to retrace the walk – …
On the 10th of November 1618, some servants who were up very early in the morning reported to Figueroa, the Spanish Ambassador, that they had seen “une grande meteor au ciel”. When another valet and some Armenians also saw something the next night, the Ambassador decided to wait up and observe for himself. Sitting outside …
In 1618, the Spanish Ambassador, García de Silva y Figueroa, travelled from Isfahan to Qazvin. On the way, he stopped at an ‘Emansade’ where he was “strangely persecuted . . for the whole night by a sort of midge, which are so white and so small as to be imperceptible”. To avoid this, on the …
If one has a bottle of vodka he never gets old. That is, according to Armenian graffiti at Siahkuh caravanserai (also called Abbasabad and Qasr-i Bahram) in the kavir between the fearsome salt plains of the Darya Namak and the neighbouring 30km expanse of salty mud. Siahkuh is now in a restricted-entry area; but it …
Recently, I showed you some Safavid-era public fountains, in Isfahan. But the massive infrastructure developments of the era included installation of water supplies in the most unlikely places – for example, in the desert area sandwiched between 40km of salt plains (the Darya Namak), and 30km of salt mud (click here for a photo of …
Shaykh Bahaie is renowned as a polymath – theologian, mathematician, philosopher, poet and physician – during the reign of Shah Abbas I. My favourite invention of his is an angled-stone sundial at the Masjid-e Shah in Isfahan, the shadows of which accurately indicate prayer times. Nearby Bahaie’s hamam in Isfahan (the water of which was …