Morehead City Travel Guide

When Shah Abbas the Great rose again to the rank of capital Isfahan, the city remained a powerful city. But the Shah further boosted his wealth to make it the subject of a comprehensive development plan that restructured its streets, plazas, parks and bridges, while embellished with magnificent monuments of religious and civil, which earned the city the nickname NESF Jahan (Half of the World).

Isfahan reached its zenith, and had then, according to the French traveler Jean Chardin, 162 mosques, 48 madrassas, or Koranic schools of theology, 273 hammam, or public baths, and over 1,800 caravan or catering establishments. The Shah also promoted communication between the capital and the periphery building an extensive road network throughout the country, with lots of bridges over waterways and caravan to relieve the stages of the path.

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Isfahan is like the saying goes the city of One Thousand and One Nights, but also is Iran’s most modern city that retains its streets beautiful scattered remnants of its past splendor of the era of the Shahs. It sees women mostly more than those of age without her chador and headscarf wear the color but without the classic black and in Shiraz started to find more modern, there is already a fact. A wonderful city for its mosques of extraordinary beauty. The focus of most impressive monuments of the city is built around Imam Square, where you can admire the mosques and Imam Lutfallah, Safavid art masterpieces as well as the palace of Ali Qapu.

Although Isfahan drag more than thirty centuries of history under its belt, the oldest remains discovered date from the Sassanid era (the dynasty before the Arab conquest, carried out at 637). The Arabs took Isfahan in 642 and was promoted to the capital of the vast central province of al-Jibal (‘Mountain’), which occupied what was once the Media, the country of the Medes. Continued to prosper under the Buyids (tenth century), whose rise to power was concurrent with the decline of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad.

The Turkish conqueror Toghril Beg, founder of the dynasty and the empire of the Seljuk Turks captured the city in the middle of XI and made capital of his vast domain. But it was with the arrival of his grandson Malik Shah to power in 1073, when the city began to grow and expand to become a metropolis. The domain of the Seljuk empire reached then an extension similar to the Achaemenid and Sassanid empires, and came from Syria and Turkey to China. The arts flourished with vigor in this period. It is the time of the astronomer, mathematician and poet Omar Khayyam Persian. Read the rest of this entry »