by Terence Ward
Opposite the palace, to the east, stood the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque under its delicate café au lait dome. Upon viewing its luminous interior, the highly critical Robert Byron gushed, “I have never encountered splendour of this kind before.” He compared it to “Versailles, or the porcelain rooms at Schönbrunn, or the Doge’s palace, or St. Peter’s. All are rich; but none so rich.” Vita Sackville-West wrote in Passenger to Teheran: “In the 16th century Isfahan Persians were building out of light itself, taking the turquoise from their sky, the green of the spring trees, the yellow of the sun, the brown of the earth, the black of their sheep and turning these into solid light.” During the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam Hussein tried to bomb these treasures, knowing he would strike at the Iranian heart.
To the north of the square, the royal bazaar opened its beguiling portal onto a world of dark shadows and merchants’ desires. The vast square symbolically balanced the secular on one side with the spiritual on the other. Directly opposite the bazaar’s huge gate, fifteen hundred feet across the square to the south, a sublime mosque soared, designed for the unsettled spirit. Yin and yang.
Once known as Shah Mosque and renamed the Imam Mosque in 1980, the building arches into a glistening sky-blue dome. Its minarets reach 150 feet into the air. The bulb-shaped dome, with its eighteen million bricks and nearly half a million aquamarine and canary-yellow tiles, is so daring a design that perhaps its only earthly rival is Brunelleschi’s terra-cotta Duomo in Florence. A zenith of Islamic architecture, the Imam Mosque, the very symbol of Isfahan’s seventeenth-century renaissance, simply staggers with its grandeur and proportion.
Crossing the dramatic arched portal of hanging sky-blue stalactites, we passed from the profane to the sacred. Inside, scores of artisans quietly pieced together new tiles, delicately crafting the mosaic work in a never-ending project. Two inner cloisters glowed Mediterranean warm with glazed azure, lemon and emerald tiles, here before the Neapolitans splashed their Santa Chiara chiostro with majolica. Subtle ceramic vegetation grew all around, myriad budding flowers and intertwining branches of trees of life. Swirling calligraphy breathed Koranic verse over the praying faithful, onto gusts of wind, into the heavens.
The Safavid dome of Sheikh Lutfullah Mosque, a masterpiece of Islamic architecture, rises from Isfahan's Imam Square, rimmed with a shopping arcade.
Historically, the dome is indigenous to Iran, born during the third-century Sassanian dynasty. Originally, classical domes like the Pantheon of Rome could rise only from circular walls. But Persian architects conceived of a dome supported by four square walls. With their ingenious breakthrough, a square evolved into a dome through honeycomb arches sprouting across the angle of the meeting point of the two walls at each corner. Domes of all shapes and sizes then became possible. This elevated form was central to Byzantine, Islamic and European Renaissance sanctuaries. Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia, Agra’s Taj Mahal and, of course, the Duomo in Florence trace their origin back to early Iran.
* * *
Hassan arrived on foot wearing his usual white shirt and black pants, sweat glistening on his forehead. He apologized for being late.
“I had to go with Fatimeh again to the market.”
“It’s our fault. We take you away.”
“No, it’s my fault. All the shopping for tonight’s dinner.”
“Baba, it’s mine,” said Kev, patting his stomach. “I eat enough for ten people.” Hassan laughed and stood straight, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief as he began his introduction to his adopted city.
“Isfahan is the city of three D’s,” he began. “Derakht for trees—never have you seen so many trees. Docharkheh, bicycles—you see them everywhere. And derayat—oh yes, Isfahanis are cunning. In the bazaar, they’ll lure you with their sweet words. But they joke only to make a sale. When you think you got the best price, they give you a compliment. Of course you feel good. But you don’t know what happened. You are the loser. There is one rule here: you cannot win against an Isfahani bazaari.”
“Sounds tough,” Chris said.
“You don’t have to buy,” Mom counseled.
“After coming all the way here?”
“Then grin and bear it,” my father added.
“Yeah, it’ll hurt so good,” said Kevin, who had targeted the bazaar for days.
Before we had left the hotel, Vaz had warned us. Nursing his upset tummy, he had chosen to stay behind, but his advice was unmistakably clear. “Watch out. Isfahani bazaaris are so cheap they’ll put cheese inside a bottle and rub bread on the outside to give it taste. With them it’s simple,” he said. “Either you lose or you get a knife in your back. Good luck.”
At breakfast, Rich had read aloud from Freya Stark’s Beyond Euphrates: “A merchant was doing very well in the bazaar. When his son grew up he took him into partnership. The son cheated the father till he reduced him to bankruptcy.” The story ended when the old man realized what his own son had done. Instead of condemning him, he burst with pride.
* * *
Eagerly, we crossed the square, following Hassan into a long, vaulted arcade echoing with syncopated hammers ringing out like xylophones. Down one alley, I spied men sitting atop ladders, beating into shape giant copper bowls the size of hippos.
“For wedding feasts,” Hassan explained.
“Those cauldrons can hold enough rice for a tribe,” Kev commented.
Sensing an endless walk ahead, my parents eyed a café. We climbed a stairway and settled them on reclining pillows on an outdoor patio perched over the bustling bazaar’s arched gateway that dominated the vast panorama. They both preferred the big picture of the “Mirror of the World” to the merchants’ maze.
We scrambled back down and spun left along a corridor, following in Hassan’s footsteps just like our childhood days. With his four boys in tow, Hassan deftly maneuvered through streaming crowds, plunging inside the medieval portal. From this entry point, the covered bazaar, cast in semidarkness, stretched four miles under sun-bleached arched roofs like an invisible spiderweb. Sealed off, the light did not spill down in luminous pools as it did in Yazd. Shadowy labyrinthine paths were lit only by gold and fluorescent lights flickering above storefronts filled with treasures. Antique silver tea sets; miniature polo scenes painted on camel bone; vegetable-dyed tribal carpets; inlaid boxes of walnut, ebony and bone; carpets in classic crimson and midnight blue; hand-painted and glazed mosaics of Aegean azure and sunflower yellow with curling ivory calligraphy—all were displayed as bait, waiting for the catch. Hanging bronze lamps shed intimate glows through their lacy cutout patterns.
Chris and Rich strolled past the notorious carpet merchants. Polite voices called out to them. “Pleeeze, come, look.”
It was a challenge to remain aloof, and Hassan understood.
“Aren’t these carpets the most splendid things you’ve ever seen?” Chris whispered to me.
With their images of Paradise, those magic woven gardens had grown out of glowing colors. Medallions swirled with climbing vines and entwined leaves, nature and poetry in motion. Arabesques, garlands and palmettes: their lustrous, sensuous surfaces were delightful to touch.
Carpet making originated with pastoral nomads four thousand years ago, when women first spun their sheep’s wool. Wooden looms that could be strapped onto the backs of mules limited a carpet’s size, and thick yarns limited the design choices. Once the craft migrated down from the hills and into the cities, artisans’ workshops created more refined products. Three innovations liberated the art form. First, with larger, stationary looms and small hands of child weavers—mostly girls—laboring on the same enormous carpet, entire palace floors could be covered. Second, fine wool and luxurious silks allowed for smaller knots. Curved lines and fine details became possible. Clear representations of budding flowers, blooming trees, leaping gazelles, galloping hunters, virtually any image could be woven. Instead of working from memory while weaving, and singing age-old tunes to call out the patterns, artisans designed
elaborate compositions on paper to guide the weavers.
Persian carpets even included poetic script, as this one from four hundred years ago:
This rug which I have made for her to tread on …
I have made the warp and weft of this rug from the thread of my soul.
For the eye which weeps pearls here, I have transformed on a rug the dust with paint on the path of my beloved.
Under her steps I have decorated her carpet with flowers with the blood of my eyes, in the hope of penetrating behind the enclosure of her pink cheeks.
Words woven into the border of another, royal carpet spoke of even greater sentiments:
… This is not a rug, but a wild white rose, a veil for the houris with large black eyes.
It is a garden full of tulips and a thousand flowers where the nightingale sings as in his kingdom … but one where the autumn wind cannot linger.
When one has contemplated the gold of its roses, one can look no longer at the sun or the moon …
O Phoenix, lift up your hands that the work will be completed.
Into Europe the carpets flooded, thanks to Venetian merchants. They were placed on palazzo floors and used as props in paintings by Mantegna, Carpaccio, Brueghel and Velázquez. Tintoretto painted a nude resting on an Isfahani rug.
* * *
I watched Chris turn over a carpet to inspect the knots. The shopkeeper smiled, knowing that a fish was nibbling on his bait.
“You have good taste, Mister.”
“Thank you. Just looking. I don’t want it.”
“Of course not.”
“How much?”
“Tabrizi is one of the best. But for you, my brother—”
“No, he’s my brother.” Chris pointed at me.
I took a bow. “I must protect him.”
Laughs and bluffing. For Chris, it was the game he loved. A strange breed, no doubt, these carpet dealers, who always claimed to be your long-lost baradar, who think nothing of swearing on the Koran or their departed mother’s soul. Otherwise, a trustworthy bunch of cultivated pirates. Hearing that my wife was from Italy, the shopkeeper introduced himself as Reza and slid into fluent Italian.
“Come va la vita in Italia?” Soon we were speaking about the expatriate Iranians working in the San Lorenzo Market in Florence. Did I know them?
“Certo, sure, I pass them each day,” I replied.
Chris bargained, and I sat down while carpet after carpet unrolled before us. The ceremonial tea arrived. Looking at the curled balls of wool dangling from a miniature loom in the shop, I remembered the bobbles that used to hang from Fatimeh’s loom like ripe fruit drooping from branches: peach, lemon and plum. Her quiet hands plucking away.
In one of Italo Calvino’s mythic cities there lay an extraordinary carpet:
It is easy to get lost in Eudoxia: but when you concentrate and stare at the carpet, you recognize the street you were seeking in a crimson or indigo or magenta thread which, in a wide loop, brings you to the purple enclosure that is your real destination. Every inhabitant of Eudoxia compares the carpet’s immobile order with his own image of the city, an anguish of his own, and each can find, concealed among the arabesques, an answer, the story of his life, the twists of fate.
In the end, we didn’t buy. Chris complimented Reza.
“A real charmer,” he whispered to me.
Next time, we explained. He understood, of course. It simply wasn’t ethical. No, we couldn’t buy. At least not yet. It was only our first pass. Plus, we had to rescue Kevin, Rich and Hassan, who were caught in other fishing nets across the passageway.
As we moved deeper into the bazaar, arched doorways with crumbling mosaics split by cracks of time opened onto secret courtyards, dried-up water pools and ancient warehouses. Hassan entered a strangely empty court and then stopped next to a fountain that hadn’t seen water for decades.
“Come sit,” he said.
“It’s so amazing to be here with you, Hassan,” Kev said. “It’s like a dream.”
“For me too. I don’t come to bazaar often, I’m too busy, but this is a quiet place.” Hassan rubbed his finger along the fountain’s edge. “It reminds me of a story. Would you like to hear?”
“Yes, baba,” Rich said. “But before that, tell us one from Mullah Nasruddin.”
“Okay, Richie. But then I tell you this one.”
He leaned back, drew a deep breath, paused with theatrical silence and then looked at us with his glistening eyes. Rich slumped down next to me. Hassan took another breath and began.
An ecstatic Isfahani carpet dealer who’s just closed a sale.
“Once Mullah Nasruddin was going to town with his donkey, and he also had his son, who was a young boy only six years old. So he let the boy ride the donkey and he walked behind. People along the way called out, ‘Hey, old man, are you stupid? Why don’t you ride the donkey and let the boy walk?’ So to make them happy, he said, ‘Okay.’ He put his son down and got on the donkey. But soon people were saying, ‘You selfish man. That little boy should not be walking.’ So both of them got on the donkey. They went a little farther. Then they heard, ‘What are you doing? That poor donkey will die carrying both of you!’ ”
Rich slapped his knee, laughing.
Hassan nodded. “Imam Ali said making fun of people is not good, but joking is good. You remember? It’s called tanz. Even if it makes you happy for no reason.”
“Tanz … of course,” Rich repeated.
Like Charlie Chaplin’s little tramp, the Iranian folkloric character Mullah Nasruddin was wise in his stupidity. A proverbial mix of clever foolishness and absent-mindedness.
Hassan straightened his back and wiped his forehead. “Here’s another silly one for you. One night, Mullah Nasruddin wakes up. He hears something outside his house, goes to the window, takes his gun and shoots at this thing moving in the dark. Next morning, he looks out at his pajamas hanging in the wind to dry, and he sees there’s a big hole in them. ‘Hey, hey, hey!’ he says. ‘Thank God I wasn’t wearing them last night.’ ”
We all chuckled. Chris’s existential fears were dissolving.
“Allah al-Akbar, Allah al-Akbar …” The call of the muezzin, amplified over loudspeakers from the mosque, rolled in undulating waves toward us, rising higher and higher in pitch before cresting and spilling into a placid baritone tide pool.
“Ahhhh!” the audience in the mosque echoed in unison. This sent Kev tumbling back to his youth. I saw his eyes glaze.
“Ashahadu ana la illaha il-Allah … I testify there is no deity but God …” Anticipating the muezzin’s vocal dexterity, the faithful hung on each note while the aria peaked. On the final unexpected note they released again: “Ahhhh!”
A good muezzin can stop you in your tracks. Indeed, that is his purpose, to shake you and urge you to pray. When done well, the hypnotic cadence is inescapable. The azan, the call to prayer, is one of the sublime religious vocal expressions.
“One more, Hassan?” I asked once the voices settled.
During the azan, I could see that Hassan had plumbed his memory for another tale.
“I remember once there was a tar player,” he began, “a man who had played for years as court musician for the king. When old age took him and his notes were not as sweet as in his youth, he was dismissed and ordered to leave the palace. The musician didn’t know what to do. He had no money, no food, only his tar. So he went into the mountains, where he found shelter in an empty room in a village. He took off his red coat and hung it on the wall. And then looked up to God and said, ‘Now I’m going to play for you. All my life I’ve played for food and coins. I’m tired, and I want to play only for you. This is my gift.’ ” Hassan turned his eyes upward as he spoke.
“So, all alone in his room, he began to play. And how sweet he played! All from the heart. So sweet, like honey, that his notes reached God. And so God visited the king in a dream and told him to take a bag of gold and go to this village, to a room with a red coat
hanging on the wall. The king obeyed and went to the village, looking for the sign. He found the red coat and heard music, but he could see no player, and he left a bag of gold. The old man was facing the wall, in the dark, playing purely from the heart, and he did not see the king.
“Later, when the musician turned around and found the gold, he was overwhelmed. ‘For seventy years,’ he thought, ‘I spent my life playing for people’s pleasure and, at the end, had nothing. But the one time I make music for God, just once, look at what happens!’ ”
I recognized Hassan’s tale. It was a version of the classic “Pir Changee,” “The Old Man” by the poet Rumi, known to all Iranians as Maulana, the Master.
“You have to let go of things,” Hassan explained. “If you live from the heart, then rewards will come to you in ways you can’t even imagine.”
“This we all feel, baba, by seeing you again,” I said. My brothers nodded in agreement.
“Baba, just one more?” Rich pleaded.
“Well, I told you that this fountain reminded me of a story.” He opened his palms to the sky. “Once there was a man in Isfahan and he had a dream. A voice told him, ‘You must go to Cairo. You will find a treasure there waiting.’ So he went by caravan across the desert and over the mountains. When he arrived, he was so tired that he fell asleep in the mosque. What he didn’t know was that three men also sleeping in the mosque were thieves. In the middle of the night, the police came and arrested the thieves, taking the Isfahani away too.