IRAN: A Persian Autumn

18th October -1st November 2008 with John Osborne

IRAN has had long and distinctive periods of civilization: the prehistoric period and the era of Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes, the Persian kings who made such an impact upon Biblical and Classical Greek history; the Parthians and Sassanians, who earned the continued respect of the mighty Roman empire; the successive dynasties who ruled after the Islamic conquest in 641 AD, including the Mongols, Tamberlaine and Shah Abbas, who turned Isfahan into a brilliant capital city; and, finally, the monarchies of the 19th and 20th century, which has seen the overthrow of the Qajar and the Pahlavi dynasties, and the resurgence of Shia Islam as a political force.

Our tour will start and finish in Teheran, where we visit the Archaeological and Islamic Museums with their fine collections from all periods of Persian history. We visit the palace of the Great Kings destroyed by Alexander the Great at Persepolis, where the magnificent ruins include finely sculptured reliefs, and their spectacular tombs hewn into the cliffs nearby at Naqsh-e-Rustam. We stay in the lovely city of Shiraz, famous for its gardens and its lyric poets, Hafiz and Saadi, buried there. We travel to the desert cities of Kerman and Yazd, with their fine mosques, the Sufi shrine at Mahan, and the Zoroastrian fire temple and ‘Towers of Silence’ outside Yazd. We spend two full days in Isfahan, the city which is ‘half the world’, according to the Iranians, to enjoy the splendour of its tiled mosques and painted palaces, and the lively, colourful bazaars, with their traditional trades and crafts.