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.

Behind the Qeysarieh Gate the Grand Bazaar of Isfahan runs for more than two kilometres of vaulted brick, north through the Harunieh and Qeysarieh caravanserais to the medieval Jameh Mosque. It is not a market appended to a city but the city's connective tissue: guild by guild — coppersmiths, miniaturists, carpet-weavers, printblock-cutters — the trades that made Safavid Isfahan a world capital of luxury goods still work at benches their great-grandfathers used.

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.