Morehead City Travel Guide

The Great Mosque or Friday Mosque of Isfahan is the oldest monumental city. It is hidden within the maze of streets and alleyways of the bazaar in the old part, and we must reach it lost by archways, tunnels and arcades full of shops full of goods to the style of an Arab medina.

Barely distinguishable from the exterior facades, as they are encompassed in the motley jumble of brick buildings attached, but once stamped their websites, you can capture the perspectives of their immense interior, in which different artistic periods and periods Iran’s history have left their mark, turning the building into a treatise on Iranian art and architecture.

Have been found in recent excavations, traces of the early eighth-century mosque, and abundant traces of the X century (period Buyid), which were absorbed into the great mosque in the Seljuk era. The floor of the mosque grew larger and more complicated over the centuries with additions that were incorporated by successive sovereigns.

The Mongol period, one of the side arches of the courtyard was transformed into a prayer hall with a superb mihrab. The Madrasa attached dating from the time of muzzafaríes, Timurid and added a winter prayer hall and a beautiful cover. Finally, in the Safavid era were filled with some decoration iwans Mozarabic, and rose the minarets that highlight the main iwan, which in turn gives a domed chamber oriented to the qibla.

The entire religious complex built around a large rectangular courtyard, with its well-known iwans in the middle of the four sides, with two ponds, one square and other poly-lobed, but the rest of the building extends to multiply in a host of agencies, cameras, arcaded galleries, hypostyle rooms (with different types of brick columns and arches, and columns that are inclined to all sides), and even urinary old, who come together to form a small neighborhood within the city.

The four iwans are different from each other, each with its set of alveoli and Mozarabic weightless, always new, always ready with great visual sense. Noted for their grandeur and beauty iwans west and south (the latter, the principal, precedes the domed room of Malik Shah), whose vaulting in cascades of alveoli brick Seljuk period, are highly original. His drawings are notable for ornamental sober, dark spots based on a plain background contrasting cream color, drawing lines that intersect geometric graphics or compose letters and words, angular features, with a sense of graphic design that could be fully present. The Timurid period brings another type of decoration based on ceramic tiles adorned with floral arabesques of vivid color, as seen in the arcades of the courtyard.

In the various prayer rooms are richly worked mihrabs stucco and panels of glazed ceramic and polychrome. Hypostyle the numerous rooms (one of them, the Board of Winter, Timurid period, no columns themselves, to get the curve of her vaults to near ground level) are over a hundred different brick domes each other and different from the early Umayyad type.

In the north iwan, facing the main iwan, it is common to see devotees practice their prayers facing Mecca, or resting on the carpet.

Source: http://web.mac.com/gcm5000/Sitio_web/_Isfah%C3%A1n.html
images sources: www.netuse.co.uk/clients/salawaat/images/mas%20jami%20isfahan.jpg; www.nordog.net/photos/photos/persia/DSC_0188-1.JPG; www.broug.com/gallery/masjid%20i%20jami.jpg; www.netuse.co.uk/clients/salawaat/images/mas%20jami,%20isfahan.gif

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