Isfahan

In 1598 Shah Abbas I moved the Safavid capital from Qazvin to Isfahan in the centre of the Iranian plateau and commissioned one of the most ambitious urban projects of the early modern world: a new royal precinct centred on a vast public square, flanked by a covered bazaar, two great mosques and the slender Ali Qapu palace. Within a generation Isfahan held some 600,000 people — comparable to contemporary London and Paris — and the proverb Esfahān nesf-e jahān, "Isfahan is half the world", entered the language.

"The great Meidan of Isfahan is, without comparison, the most beautiful and most spacious square that I have seen in any city of the world."

The square's 89,600 m² hosted polo matches, military reviews, public executions and the open-air markets that connected the royal court to the working city. The Shah Mosque's main portal rotates 45° to face Mecca, an elegant solution that hides the structural pivot inside an iwan of tiled muqarnas.

Eleven historic bridges span the Zayanderud, the seasonal river that crosses the city. Si-o-Se-Pol (1602) and Khaju Bridge (1650) are the masterpieces — both are weirs, public walks and tea-house terraces as well as crossings, and both were built with the same Safavid logic that gave the city its square: architecture as social infrastructure.

Shah Abbas's Safavid capital around the Maydan-e Naqsh-e Jahan and its surrounding monuments.

Images shown here are served from the local media library.