An Earthly Paradise

By Heidi Noroozy

Fin Garden in Kashan

Picture yourself strolling through a lovely garden. In the center, water tumbles from a fountain and bubbles merrily through clear, blue channels. At one end stands a raised pavilion built around a tranquil pool. You pluck a juicy orange from a nearby tree, bend to smell fragrant roses, or rest on a bench in the leafy shade of a sycamore. Sound like paradise? Not quite. What I’ve just described is a traditional Persian garden.

Or maybe the two are really the same thing. The ancient Persians, who invented these oases of nature in a desert landscape, called them paradaeza (walled space), from which our word, paradise, is derived. And it is even said that the descriptions of Eden in the Koran and Bible are based on these pieces of heaven on earth.

The earliest known Persian garden is in Pasargadae, the Persian capital founded by Cyrus the Great, who ruled Persia in the sixth century B.C. The stone walls that once enclosed it are long gone, but with a bit of imagination you can still make out the places where a central pool and four water channels divided the space into geometric quadrants, symbolizing the Zoroastrian elements of sky, earth, water, and plants. Another interpretation is that this layout represents the ancient Persian view of the universe as four fields divided by four rivers.

Narenjestan, Shiraz

This design is typical of modern Persian gardens, and today it’s a style known as chahar bagh (four gardens). Some of the most beautiful examples are the Hasht Behesht (Eight Heavens) in Isfahan and the Fin Garden in Kashan. These gardens are works of art, combining nature and architecture into a harmonious whole. The landscape designers made good use of light and shadow to create tranquil environments that encourage contemplation, perhaps a much needed thing in Iran’s turbulent and often violent history. Water is always present in the form of running streams and still pools, not only as nourishment for the living plants but also as a Zoroastrian symbol of life.

These patches of green in the brown desert are well adapted to Iran’s arid climate. Irrigation comes from a system of qanats, or underground aqueducts, that channel water from natural springs or distant mountains. The walls protect the garden from desert winds and help retain moisture, while leafy trees provide shade from the burning sun. When you pass through the gate and into the garden, the air inside is fresher and cooler than the dry desert heat outside.

Persian gardens are a central element in Iranian culture. They feature prominently in music, art, literature, and carpet design. As symbols of the Zoroastrian belief that civilization and nature are intertwined, they also form part of holiday rituals. On the thirteenth day of the Persian New Year, which takes place in March, people leave their homes and share picnics in nearby parks and gardens. Many city dwellers maintain a bagh on the outskirts of town—a private, walled garden used for quiet contemplation, socializing, and growing fruit, which is harvested and brought back to town for sharing with family and friends.

Garden carpet from Isfahan

Last year, UNESCO added the Persian Garden to its World Heritage list as a collective property that includes nine gardens selected from all over Iran. They range from the Eram Garden in Shiraz to Abbasabad in Mazandaran Province. One of the criteria for inclusion on the list is that these gardens represent an interchange of human values, since they have served as a model for garden designs all over the world, from India to Europe.

You may have visited a Persian garden yourself, especially if you’ve ever been to one of these places: the TajMahal, the Alhambra, or Versailles. There may even be one near where you live. So the next time you wander through a public garden, stop for a moment in the shade of a leafy tree near a bubbling fountain and remember the Zoroastrians who first created a piece of paradise on earth.

Water, Water...Underground

The Kavir Desert of central Iran is the last place I’d go looking for a piece of verdant paradise. But in the Fin suburb south of Kashan, on the edge of this great salt desert, lies a beautiful oasis called Bagh-e Fin (Fin Garden). Enclosed by sand-colored brick walls, the garden is a refuge of cypress-lined paths bordering blue-tiled channels that connect pavilions built over shallow pools of clear water. If you sit on a bench by one of the many bubbling fountains and breathe in the cool, jasmine-scented air, you’ll forget the heat and dust of the arid landscape beyond the enclosure.

The Fin Garden draws its water from the Cheshmeh Suleiman (Solomon’s Spring), located a short distance away. According to local lore, this spring has been the lifeblood of the local population for 7,000 years—and it has never dried up in all that time. But the most astonishing thing about this spring is not its longevity or Biblical name, but the fact that it is part of a man-made water system that dates back to antiquity. Known as a qanat, it is like a Roman aqueduct—turned upside down.

Qanats were invented by the Persians in pre-Islamic times as a way to ensure a regular water supply for settlements and agriculture in arid regions.They begin with a reservoir in the mountains for collecting snow runoff. Qanat builders, known as muqannis, dig a channel deep underground leading from the reservoir to the final destination, sometimes covering distances of many miles. Then they sink shafts at intervals to tap into the underground channel and bring the water to the surface. Some qanats make use of existing subterranean streams or a series of natural springs. In Iran, 22,000 qanats are still in operation today. Running the water underground, rather than in Roman-style aqueducts, prevents evaporation in the desert heat.

These Persian aqueducts are so difficult and time consuming to build and maintain that the Achaemenian kings of ancient Persia awarded land grants to anyone who could create one. It is astonishing how they could have been constructed at all without the use of heavy machinery, power tools, or even modern surveying equipment. Yet even in ancient times, the technology spread throughout the Middle East and as far west as Spain. In fact, the term, qanat, comes from the Arabic; the Persians called their water system a kareez.

Ab anbar (cistern) with 4 badgirs, Yazd, Iran
Photo by Michal Salaban

In some desert cities, including Kashan, the qanat is combined with a traditional ventilation system called a badgir (literally, wind trap). This is a wind tower constructed above a building and designed to capture the wind and direct it down into the interior, where the air passes over cool water flowing through the qanat. The result is a natural air-conditioning system.

The oldest qanat still in operation lies in the northeastern Iranian province of Razavi Khorasan, which shares borders with Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. This aqueduct supplies water to nearly 40,000 people in and around the city of Gonabad. It is estimated to be 2,500 years old and is being considered as a UNESCO world heritage site.

The Kashan qanat captured my imagination on a visit to the Fin Garden. Our guide explained how the water system fed the small fountains bubbling along the garden’s narrow water channels by using precisely calculated angles and the force of gravity rather than pumps.  Later, after we left the cool shade of the leafy oasis, the guide led us down a dusty lane to another walled enclosure. This turned out to be the Cheshmeh Suleiman, a pool of dark water surrounded by gray rock. I sat on a stone and gazed into the spring, which looked deep enough to emanate from the very center of the earth. How clever the ancient Persians were, I thought, to channel this unassuming pool of water through the ground and carve a life-supporting environment out of the desert.