the peacock
I was going to leave Isfahan and take a night train to Tehran today. Needed to catch my flight to Taiwan from there. But! There was at least one more mosque on the Naqsh-e Jahan Square in Isfahan that I hadn’t seen yet:
It was the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque, a rare private mosque that a 17th-century Shah had erected exclusively for himself and his entourage. It didn’t have any minarets, but it had a particularly nice dome:
And in the center of the dome, when viewed from a certain angle, there was a reflection that looked like a peacock:
I loved it, because seeing the peacock’s tail somehow felt a bit like managing to do a finishing move in Mortal Kombat.
Anyway, considering that I still had some time before my train ride, I decided to go to the Aali Qapu Palace which was right on the other side of the square. It didn’t look that impressive from the outside:
And yet there were quite a few tourists (most of them grey-haired ladies and gentlemen from Europe) who were happily snapping away:
And they were right:
It was all very pretty:
And some of the halls inside the palace were breathtaking:
There was a music hall with hundreds of little niches in the walls…
…and in the ceiling:
I found them very beautiful, but they apparently served acoustic purposes.
Anyway, I ended up spending a lot of time on a large balcony:
You could look over the square and parts of the city from up there:
I stayed until late in the afternoon, then I left the palace and the square and Isfahan:
It had turned out to be one of my favorite cities:
When I got to the train station, I noticed an advertisement with a depiction of what the Zayandeh River was supposed to look like when it wasn’t completely dried up:
May you get your water back, I thought.
And I left Isfahan with a heavy heart.
Jorgelina
Wow! Such intricate design! Amazing and beautiful!
Joshua
It is a dry country so
It’s possible like here
In California
That there is
Seasonality to the rivers
(Due in large part to agriculture)
But also
The drier nature of the wet season