Making Gold Out Of Dust – Kashan’s Historic Houses

Photo by Shahram Sharif

In 1993, when the head of UNESCO visited the ancient Iranian city of Kashan, he remarked, “Kashani architects were the greatest alchemists of history. They could make gold out of dust.”

He was referring to the grand merchant houses that Kashan is famous for. Built or expanded in the 19^th century, these buildings could easily compete with Iran’s finest royal palaces. Most are divided into three main parts: the andaruni (private rooms for the family in residence), biruni (public areas for entertaining guests), and khadameh (servants’ quarters). The houses feature multiple courtyards with sunken gardens and reflecting pools flanked by flowers and fruit trees, porches facing the courtyards where the families could sit on a balmy summer nights and admire the stars, walls richly decorated with carvings of fruit, flowers, birds, and abstract designs, many of them reflecting the merchant’s specialty trade. In some of these houses, stained glass windows send patterns of colored light dancing across marble floors.

The architects of Kashan’s merchant houses knew how to make the best of a harsh desert climate. They built rooms deep into the earth, where the families would move in summer and enjoy natural air conditioning from the wind towers (badgirs – literally, “wind catchers”), which draw in hot air and cool it on the descent below ground. The south-facing rooms on the surface offered comfortable warmth for winter quarters.

Several years ago, on a trip to Kashan, my husband and I toured several of these magnificent houses, many of which now belong to the Iranian Cultural Heritage Organization and have been restored.

We started the tour at the Ameri House, the largest of Kashan’s merchant homes. The original structure dates back to the Zand Dynasty (1750–1794), but Agha Ameri, a merchant who dealt in food and household items, rebuilt the house in the 19^th century, turning it into a sprawling complex with seven courtyards and 85 rooms. The walls are decorated with carvings of his merchandise: pots, samovars, pears, and grapes.

Ameri House

You enter the house through double wooden doors with the region’s traditional metal knockers on the front. One knocker is rectangular and solid, with intricate, embossed designs. The other is round and hollow without any ornamentation. The solid knocker is intended for male visitors and the round one for women, and each makes a distinctive sound so the residents of the house always knows which gender is knocking at the front door.

In the very heart of Kashan stand two houses that are linked by an underground passage and a common history. The story goes like this: Seyed Hassan Natanzi, a carpet merchant who earned the nickname Boroujerdi through the lively trade he conducted with the town of Boroujerd, approached another carpet dealer, Jafar Tabatabei, with a marriage proposal on behalf of Boroujerdi’s son. Tabatabei had no objection to the match. But he did have one condition – that Boroujerdi build the bride a house as lovely as the one she grew up in.

When a father sets such a condition, what he really means is, “build a bigger and better one.” Apparently Boroujerdi understood this subtext very well because, starting in 1857, it took him eighteen years, 150 workmen, and likely plenty of frayed nerves to build a house for the happy “newlyweds.” I can’t help wondering where the poor little rich girl lived in the meantime. Certainly not in a half-built house with the chaos and noise of construction all around her. Very likely she moved in with the groom’s family and dreamed of the day when she’d be the mistress of her own place.

Boroujerdi House

The distinctive feature of the Boroujerdi House is the design of its wind towers, which are hexagonal instead of the usual square shape. A reception hall at one end of the main courtyard features stalactite-shaped moldings and frescoes by Kamal-e Molk, the most famous Iranian artist of the time.

 

The Tabatabei House has four major courtyards with fountains and pools at the center, domed ceilings with skylights that reflect sunlight onto richly decorated walls, and entire banks of stained glass windows in patterns of red, blue, and green. Carvings on the walls depict floral sprays, cypress trees, and diamond-shaped designs typical of a Persian carpet. Agha Boroujerdi had his work cut out to top this palatial home.

Tabatabei House
Photo by Matthias Blume

We visited Kashan during Ramadan, and arrived at the Tabatabei House just before dusk. A crew of men and women were preparing iftar, the meal that breaks the day’s fast, and were busy setting out plates of flat bread, cheese, herbs, walnuts, and dates.

The crew told us that they were getting ready to welcome a group of children who were to attend a ceremony celebrating the revelation of the Koran to the Prophet Mohammed (which is what Ramadan is all about). With true Iranian hospitality, they offered us zoolbia, a date-syrup-drenched pastry that is a typical Ramadan treat.

Preparing for iftar

That evening, we drove away from Kashan with stories of brides and carpet merchants in our heads, the visions of secret gardens and towering badgirs before our eyes, and the sweet taste of dates on our tongues.

A Celebration of Roses

The best time to visit Kashan, a city on the edge of Iran’s Dasht-e Kavir Desert, is in May when the entire town is filled with the heady fragrance of roses. Kashan is one of two major centers of rosewater production in Iran (the other one is Shiraz), and May is when the harvest is in full swing.

The desert may not seem like the best place to grow a water-hungry plant like the rose. But Kashan is uniquely situated between the desert and the Karkas Mountains, where abundant water and cool air create ideal conditions for flower cultivation. In particular, the climate is perfect for the Damask rose, (Gol-e Mohammadi in Persian), a deep pink bloom with an especially strong and appealing fragrance.

Rosewater, or golab as the Iranians call it, is mainly an ingredient in perfume, cosmetics, and air fresheners here in the West, but in Iran it turns up in traditional medicines, cooking, and even religious ceremonies. Rosewater is used to treat many ailments, from skin infections to heart palpitations, and it flavors sweets such as cream puffs and ice cream. One of my favorite Persian desserts is sholeh zard, a rice pudding scented with saffron and rosewater.

Kashan rosewater is so highly prized, in fact, that every year the region sends barrels of it to Mecca, where it is used to wash the Ka’aba during the annual Hajj pilgrimage to this holiest of Muslim sites.

Ghamsar, Iran

Iranians celebrate the essence of the Damask rose with a series of ceremonies during the Gol-o-Golab (Rose and Rosewater) Festival, which is held in Kashan and nearby towns over a period of several weeks, starting in mid-May. The specific dates change from year to year because this festival is entirely dependent on the flowers it celebrates and must wait until the roses unfold their petals.

Over the course of the rose harvest, rosewater producers in Kashan, Ghamsar, Niasar, and other nearby towns open their homes and gardens to visitors, who flock to the region to watch the locals extract the essence from pink rose petals. While many mechanized factories exist, most rosewater is still distilled by hand, using age-old techniques and traditional equipment.

The day begins early, when men and women head out to the fields to pick blossoms. This has to be done before dawn, since the rose’s scent diminishes in the heat of the sun. Then they dump the gathered harvest into copper cauldrons, add water, cover the pot, and bring its contents to the boil. The rosewater is distilled through metal pipes and collected in traditional clay vessels.

The Gol-o-Golab Festival is much more than just an opportunity to see rose distillers at work. In the evenings, after a long hard day at the rosewater distillery (remember, they get up before dawn), people head for the parks to listen to music and watch parades and pageants. Educational programs are also on offer; in past years, Kashan University has invited the public to attend lectures on rosewater extraction and new methods of rose cultivation.

Photo by Persian Boy

I’ve yet to attend this celebration of roses, although the festival is high up on my bucket list. So far, I’ve always managed to visit Iran at the wrong time of year. The closest I’ve come to this fragrant experience was on a trip to Kashan in October. While exploring the city’s Bazaar, I caught the scent of roses and followed my nose. It led me to a section where shop after shop had roses for sale in every possible form, from rosewater to dried petals. I bought a small bag of gol-e sorkh (dried rose blossoms) and learned all kinds of uses for them. They’re especially good steeped in tea or crushed and sprinkled over yogurt.

I’m due for another trip to Iran soon, and May in Kashan sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

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.