Isfahan!

Isfahan: That is the town from a “golden age”, that is the great Meaydun-e-Imam, the waste square surrounded of arcades, the Lotfallah and the Imam Mosque, the Ali-Qapu-Palace and the bazaar. The square with its size of 510 x 150 m is one of the biggest in the world: only the Tjananmen Square in Peking is bigger. Anyway, I'd say that it is for sure the most beautiful square in the world as far as I am concerned! Isfahan: that is also the color turquoise: the roofs of the mosques and the Iwans are turquoise and beautifully ornamented. Isfahan: that is the beautiful bridges crossing the Zayand-e-Rud with its lovesick men singing lovely but heartbreaking tunes under the bridges’ arches.
Isfahan: that is a colorful bazaar! Here, we stayed a good week and explored the different parts of the town which was mostly built in the 16th Century by Shah Abbas. On the big square, he had his Polo-games playing and impressed European legates with huge military parades. It is even said, that – to impress the English legate – he let the troops walk by the square, then they left the square at one end, ran quickly through the mosque, the Madrasah and parts of the bazaar back to start and reentered the square again to add themselves to an impressive, never-ending flow of soldiers! Isfahan also has a beautiful Armenian church that is beautifully decorated in the orthodox style…
In the evening then a lazy stroll around the big square and diving into the bazaar for a while. The bazaar is very colorful and metal and copper works as well as wooden artwork and carpets are sold. In one corner, the fabric printers are located and you can look at how they print the tissues with old stamps in natural colors – beautiful, multicolored designs that take several rounds of stamping, each with another color. Around another corner, you hear the "clack-clack" of the metal workers and still in another coin, there are young men painting very concentrated on some miniatures. And then the spice bazaar: What colors and what smell!!!

One day, we went to a Sufi Tomb outside the city. Well, it was actually not the tomb that interested us but the architecture of the small built-in-brick mausoleum: It contains of a small Iwan that is flanked by two minarets (an Iwan, by the way, is a vaulted portal opening onto a courtyard and is a typical part of Iranian mosque architecture). For some strange reason, the whole building shakes when one of the minarets is shaken and the other minaret shakes with it, too. Every hour, one of the guards climbs up the one minaret and shakes it to show this amazing effect. To prove the shaking of the second, a small bell is fixed on it that rings when shaken. However, as soon as we got there, at least twenty people - apparently bored with the waiting for the attraction and looking for some other distraction - surrounded us and started to ask questions and taking pictures. So fascinated they were from us (and especially from me as being so white and unusually tall) that they even forgot about the shaking minarets and instead watched me taking photos of it (as this was not the first time that people showed so much interest in me, Nabi started to think about asking for some entry fee for anybody wanting to see me or taking photographs of me!).