The Adventures of Sen, Sonja, Toroa and Tamatea.

April 2nd - 16th Sen's visit to Iran

Most of the group of the 17 at Schiphol on April 2nd.

Our route for the two week tour. We travelled in a tourbus to Shiraz and
flew back to Tehran.

We arrived in Tehran after about 6 hours. The tour organizers met us with a bus which took us to the hotel.

Mahdiye Ghasamy was our tour guide for the whole trip. Three students organized this trip. Our group were mainly students from Amsterdam and Leiden.

The hotel in Tehran was basic with a dining room in the basement. The central heating was on full and it was so hot that it was hard to sleep on the first night.

A building site and (below) a park close to the hotel.

There are narrow tunnels being built under the foundation.

Some of Tehran's famous propaganda wall paintings.

View in the same park.

Breakfast on the first day in the dining room of the hotel.

In the foreground are Abdelmoenin's back, Sebastiaan and Kitty.

Breakfast was flat leathery bread with goats cheese.

Our bus had lots of character but not much horsepower. It took us to the bank to change our Euros to Rials. We got about 7000 Rial for one Euro.
So each wad of notes, as you see in Sebastiaan's hands, is worth about 110 Euros.

This is the concrete Freedom Monument built ironically by the Shah in 1971. It rained constantly.

Next we went to the former US embassy complex,
which is now a museum of American crimes in Iran.

On the right is the largest building in the complex. Here you see a painting of
Khomeini who is blessing the
helmet of a fallen soldier.

The wall around the compound is covered in officially painted murals about the evils of America. The face of the
statue of liberty below is a skull.

The bus left without two of us but I was ahead and jumped out in front of it. After that we always did a head count before leaving.
We then visited the archeological and the islamic museums.

The rain turned to hail. This is in front of the hotel at about 6 p.m.

During the night rivers flowed down the streets.

The park near the hotel was strewn with rubble and you could see a watercourse of rocks, sand, rubbish and mud which had been carried by the water. The flooding was very unusual for Tehran.

The next morning the flooding was not so bad and we travelled by bus to Qom a city about 100km south to see the shrine of Fatimah.

On the way out of Tehran we stopped at the shrine of Ayatollah Khomeini, which is still under construction. There is an enormous prayer hall (the area under the golden dome) in the centre with a steel structured roof. It felt like a congress hall. The floors are marble with islands of prayer mats. On either side buildings that looked like seminaries, were under contruction.

Hazrat -é Masumeh,
the shrine of Fatimah in Qom.

Our group in a teahouse just before Qom, where you sat on 50 cm high platforms with a table cloth in the middle of each platform. In the foreground above our translator and guide, Mahdiye sat at a table.

<- Left to Right: Sigmund, Henk and Gea.

Fatimah, the sister of Imam Reza (the 6th of the 12 Imams) was interred here in the 9th century and is a site of pilgrimage. This extensive complex was built under Shah Abbas I (reigned 1587-1629), as a counterweight to the other shrines at Najaf and Karbala then under Ottoman occupation. The golden dome was added later by Fath Ali Shah (reigned 1797 - 1834).

It was richly tiled and densely crowded in the small spaces. The room under the dome is about 10 metres square with a green cloth covering the coffin inside a grid-like structure in the centre. This space is then divided by a partion creating a space for women and another for men. I couldn't get near enough to see much because people were hanging onto the cage structure while reciting prayers. Others sat on the ground around the walls reciting prayers.

We then bussed onto Kashan, an oasis town at the foot of gentle hills.

Here we are at a teahouse just up from the garden of Fin, on the hills just south-west of Kashan.

Freek and Henk are in the foreground.

The stream flows through this teahouse and down into the gardens.

Selma and Sybil are in the foreground.

The garden of Fin was built Shah Abbas I
(c. 1600) who had a palace in Kashan. In 1852, Amir Kabir, a great prime minister, was murdered in this garden.

The water flowed through the summer house in the centre
of the garden, a walled enclosure with trees, paths, and ponds.

We then went to the hotel which was about 4 km from town centre. The guide and I went by bus to centre where the bazar (covered market) was closing down and also saw the old city wall.

I also saw more of these sorts of
summer-winter houses in Yazd.

View over Kashan from the hotel looking south to the hills. Older houses in this area are made out of (abode) clay. You can see a row of abode houses in the middle of the photo.

This the House of Borujerdi, a merchant house built in the early 19th century.

The downstairs quarters were lived in by the family in summer, and the upstairs in the winter because the summer is very hot there.

name of house???? around the corner and across a small road from the previous house. It is still under renovation and has been recently open for tourists.
This merchant house is built around five courtyards, each containing a pool. This photo is taken from the roof, which we could walk around to see all five courtyards.

Below is the same pool.
I stood on the lower roof opposite to take the previous photo.

Below is the opposite view of the same pool taken from the roof.

Left to Right:
Henk, Mohammad, Abdelmoenin, Liesbeth,?,?,?,?, Christiaan.

This is one of the two domes behind
the entrance in the photo above.

This is the second dome.
It is all done with mirrors set into plaster.
The motief was stars within stars.

The primitive kitchen adjacent to the first of the domed rooms was sunk 4 or 5 steps lower. The walls of the whole room were blackened with soot. On the right is one of the two fireplaces and the ceiling was more than 3 metres high.

This is the second courtyard where the entrances were at the height of the roofline. The windtower (inset above) works like a chimney in reverse. It funnels wind down through narrow flutes into the underground part of the house.

None of the rooms in this courtyard were open yet.
The painting work on the plaster walls was in light relief.

In the distance, the remaining section of city wall is slowly disintegrating. It is just mud, about 5 metres thick, 8 metres high and 300 metres long. You could see remnants of a complicated system of towers within and outside the main wall. The tower outside the wall was connected by a lateral wall, with a narrow tunnel in its base. Homeless people were living in a passageway that had been broken through part of the wall.

Henk on the roof, showing two other courtyards which we couldn't enter. The roof is surfaced with ceramic tiles laid over clay. Most of the house is built out of clay. Poorer people have clay roofs painted with tar, and very poor people have just clay. They have to climb onto the roof to press the water out with a heavy roller.

Some views over the city, from the same roof.

Standing in the middle of the house overlooking two courtyards.

The fifth courtyard where you can see a window or entrance to the summer house underground.

Mahdiye in an underground passage leading up from the food storage rooms to the dining area of the upstairs house. There was an extensive system of rooms and passages and we could only enter one tunnel and empty two food storage rooms.

Below:
Looking over the entrance to the house. The wind tower in the middle belongs to the house of Borujerdi. The tiled pointed tower is most unusual for Iran. I only saw one like this. ?? Any more info about this tower??

The conical shaped building in the centre is the remains of an ice house used for storing ice collected from the mountains during the winter.

A street near the House of Borujerdi; you can see this street was once the inside of a house by the stairs and the raised door.

We spent a few hours at the two houses above and then went to the Madrasé-yé of Agha Bozorg, a mosque and theological school about a kilometre north of these houses. It is famous for its archways and minarets.
The classrooms are downstairs around a courtyard.

The black flags are there for Ashura, the mourning period for Imam Husayn, the grandson of Muhammad who was martyred at Karbila.

This is Sen at the entrance from the courtyard to the mosque (the left smaller arch in the photo below). On the ground on the left is a pile of cloths to be hung around the mosque.

In the afternoon, our bus took us towards Isfahan. We left the main road to go up a mountain valley towards the historic village of Abyaneh. This is a photo of another mountain village lower in the valley.

The remains of a fortified village, also on the way up.

The village of Abyaneh is at the end of the sealed road at 2500 metres at the foot of Mt Karkas (3899 metres). What is intact dates from the Safavid period (1502-1722). From this parking place the village extends down a steep sloop towards a stream. There is a fortress on the rocks above on the left. These houses were inhabited as far as I could see but in the rest of the village most houses were empty.

A typical lane in the village looking up to the fort.

We saw more tourists than inhabitants. There were too other buses at the same time as ours, one being also foreign tourists.

The houses are built on the rocky slope above the valley is used for farming and is probably prone to flooding from the river Barzrud.

Most homes are built out of willow, stone and clay and the front yards of some were built on the top of homes below.

Some of the better kept houses.

Abyaneh
April 5th

The lower part of the village with a fortress at the foot of the mountains on the other side of the river.

Many of the doors would have two door knockers. Double front doors were the norm. This is the men's knocker, it makes a good thunk, and the people inside know there is a man outside. So a man answers the door. The women's knocker would make a tink.

The Jame` mosque at Abyaneh has a pool in the middle and open wooden porticos. The largest portico, which would be used for Friday prayers, has no outside wall, so that it offers a view across the valley.

Back on the main road to Isfahan, we stopped to see a former Sufi cloister at Natanz.

The view from the prayer hall.

Shiloh in a tree outside the cloister. This many centuries old tree was about 5 metres across.

Isfahan April 6th:
Population: 1.3 million and capital of a providence, which is mostly desert. It has many beautiful buildings and bridges.

It was the capital of the country from about 1587 until 1722 when the capital was transferred to Shiraz. During this time, some of the most beautiful architeture and arts made in the Islamic world were made here.

To April 16th and further