esfahan life river

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When Si-o-Seh Pol (The Bridge of 33 Arches) was born (1602), Isfahan was larger than London, more cosmopolitan than Paris, and grander, by some accounts, than even storied Istanbul.

Elegant bridges crossed its modest river, lavishly outfitted polo players dashed across the world's largest square and hundreds of domes and minarets punctuated the skyline.

Europeans, Turks, Indians and Chinese flocked to the glittering Persian court, the center of a vast empire stretching from the Euphrates River in what is today Iraq to the Oxus River in Afghanistan

In the 17th century, the city's wealth and grandeur inspired the rhyming proverb, Isfahan nesf-e jahan, or "Isfahan is half the world.”

After a brutal siege shattered that golden age in the early 18th century, new rulers eventually moved the capital to Tehran, leaving Isfahan to languish as a provincial backwater, which not incidentally left many of the old city's monuments intact.

"One could explore for months without coming to an end of them," marveled British traveler Robert Byron on his 1933-34 journey across Asia. That artistry, he wrote in The Road to Oxiana, "ranks Isfahan among those rarer places, like Athens or Rome, which are the common refreshment of humanity.”

Isfahan's history is an epic cycle of fabulous boom and calamitous bust. Here a road traveling across the Iranian plateau east to the Mesopotamian plain meets a path connecting the Caspian Sea to the north with the Persian Gulf to the south.

That geography linked the city's fate to the merchants, pilgrims and armies who passed through. Blessed with a pleasant climate - the city lies at 1590 meters (5,217 ft) above sea level on the eastern side of the Zagros Mountains, and has relatively mild summers - Isfahan evolved into a bustling township at ancient Persia's crossroads.

Esfahan is known as the jewel of Persia with its rich Islamic and Persian architecture and historical sites. The historic bridges over the River Zayandeh are the city's other great attractions.

There are several of them but the best known ones are the Khaju Bridge built in the mid-17th century by Shah Abbas and the 300m, 33-arch Si-o-She Bridge, which also serves as a dam.

Strolling along the river near the two ancient bridges is a pleasant way to spend an evening in Esfahan. The bridges which are close to the city centre are illuminated at night.

IsfahanThe beginning of a tale told by Shirin Farameh to John Pitt –

Through the famous city there flows a river.It rises in the mountains to the leftand expires in the desert to the right.If a river can be said to have a purpose,

The purpose of this river is not to unite itselfwith the waters that encircle the inhabitated earthbut, to make more possible this beautiful city:

To make gardens of melons and quincesand fountains in the public squares;

to wet the pavements of mosques and seminariesand to run down channels by the thoroughfaresin which Mercedes busesare forever breaking their axles

And to be spanned by five bridges, their pierssinking into a fathomless antiquity.

This is why the Isfahanianscall it the Zendeh Rud, the 'Life River‘.

The subsidiary purpose of the riveris to flow through your memory,bathing you in an insufferable regret.

For the river carries upon ittraces of an earlier existencethat is now substantiated only by this –

The beginnings of a story (Taken from the book A Good Place to Die by James Buchan)

Andre Malraux, the famous French author and adventurer says:

"Who can claim to have seen the most beautiful city of the world without having seen Esfahan?"

"Where did the good old days go? Are they in the story books or just gone from here?" Parham Baghestani.

Sound: Djivan Gasparyan - I'm gone

Iran

Text: Internet

Pictures: Sanda Foi oreanuş

Nicoleta Leu

Arangement: Sanda Foi oreanuş

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