SAFAVID PALACESBY WOLFRAM KLEISS

MOST OF THE PALACES, PAVILIONS, AND VILLAS BUILT IN

the Safavid period have not survived. Many weredestroyed, especially during the Afghan conquestof Isfahan in 1722. Others were neglected andleft to decay, or fell victim to earthquakes. Ofthose that remain many have been altered intheir outward appearance by structural changes.Fortunately, European travelers of the seven-teenth and eighteenth centuries have left sketch-es and drawings of several of them, so if we can nolonger discern function and ground plan, at leastwe can gain an impression of general appear-ance.

Knowledge about the details of plan, form, andfunction of both large and small Safavid palacescan be gathered from the number of palaces andruins that remain in Isfahan, Qazvin, in smalltowns, and in the countryside.' Safavid palacearchitecture-as can be verified from the stillextant buildings in Isfahan-marks the climax inthe development of Iranian palace construction.

In Iran, the art of building showed great con-cern for tradition throughout all periods of Per-sian culture. Thus, Achaemenid motifs were stillin use in Parthian architecture, and details ofAchaemenid columns, like the double-protomecapital, can still be seen in Tehran on twentieth-century buildings. In view of this, it is not aston-ishing that similar organizational principles re-mained in use from late Sasanian to early Islamictimes. Usually it took the form of a tripartitearrangement composed of three parallel axessometimes constituting a cross-axial plan. Thissystem can be observed in its early form in the so-called Sasanian palaces near Sarvistan 2 (fig. 1; thedate of Sarvistan is still uncertain) and nearDamghan (aboutwhose hypothetical reconstruc-tions Lionel Bier has raised some doubts else-where in this volume). Its later, more common,form of ground plan and distribution of roomscan be seen in the Safavid palaces of the seven-teenth century, like that of 'Aliabad near Furk(fig. 2) in southern Iran. s It was later handeddown to the Qajar architecture of the nineteenthcentury.

It is important to stress the similarity of thetripartite organizational system in the building ofSarvistan and in seventeenth-century palaces, and

the fact that only Islamic pottery can be found inthe area around the domed building of Sarvistan.No matter when it was constructed it continuedto be used without any significant change in itsarchitecture into the Islamic period.

In the ground plans of many Safavid pavilionsthe Achaemenid apadana can be recognized,with its four iwans opening onto the outside andits four corner buildings or groups of rooms, likethose in the pavilion (fig. 3) east of the HashtBihisht in Isfahan, the remaining parts of whichwere recorded before its complete disappear-ance several years ago. The form is also seen inthe late Safavid-early Qajar pavilion at the citadelof Bam (fig. 4).

Variations in this cross-axial ground plan devel-oped in the Iranian building tradition to servediverse functions. First was the palace for theroyal court. Royal pavilions in cities were linkedto spacious gardens, to the surrounding country-side, or to a small garden at least, as in Isfahan atthe Chihil Sutun and the Hasht Bihisht (seeNecipoglu, figs. 10a [o,t], 11 [8]). The plans andfunctions of these are well known and will not bediscussed here in detail.4

There were also villas belonging to rich land-owners and seats of the royal court in the country-side. We do not know to whom they belonged orwhat the position of a particular owner was. Anexample is CAbbasabad, north of Natanz (fig. 5)on the old road from Natanz to Kashan, a mud-brick building on a foundation of rubble whichalso uses the tripartite system of organization inits layout.5 Itis a typical domed hall with one story,part of which was divided into two stories byinserting a floor in between to provide living andstorage units. The building opens toward a waterbasin and a rectangular terraced garden. A cy-press on a mound dominates the garden on itsmain axis.

Tajabad, 6 on the caravan route from Isfahan toNatanz, also belongs to this group (fig. 6). It issituated in a large garden with fountains andwater basins and was connected with a farm. Thecomplex also includes a bathhouse of Safavidorigin. The tripartite structure of the main build-ing is cross-axial. The rooms are richly decoratedwith painted stucco; some of them have domes.

WOLFRAM KLEISS

Another domed building in the park of the com-plex at Tajabad (fig. 7), the conception of whichhad originally been a very regular cross-shape,was obviously never finished; its architecture haschanged considerably over the years.

In Isfahan palaces and pavilions of diverse sizesand functions did exist, but they were pulleddown in the course of time. One of them was theTalar-i Ashraf which had a cross-axial tripartitearrangement similar to that of the building in'Aliabad near Furk (fig. 2) or the viewing pavilionat the north end of the Chahar Bagh avenue,which fell victim to modern development. Thepavilion's facade is known only through old pho-tographs (see Necipoglu, fig. 10a [8]).

A special type of ground plan is the eight- orsixteen-sided pavilion, like that in the Rose Gar-den at Isfahan (fig. 8; see also Necipoglu, fig. 1 Oa[r] ), which is known only through some drawingsby Engelbert Kaempfer 7 who accompanied aEuropean embassy to the Safavid court in 1684-85. Another pavilion of this type (which stillexists) is the octagonal tower-shaped buildingvisible from afar on its steep conical mountain(fig. 9) above Natanz.8 It was a royal huntingpavilion which the monarch used when he was inresidence near Natanz to hunt the numerousdeer there. Yet it may equally well be called a mil,a landmark for caravans, because of its exposedposition and its tower-shaped high outer dome.

The projecting pier in the middle of the KhajuBridge in Isfahan, which is laid out in the shapeof a pavilion on both sides of the roadway, alsofunctioned as a recreation lodge, as did the nolonger extant Mirror Pavilion (Ayina-khana) onthe river bank of the Zayanda Rud in Isfahan.Like the bridge, the pavilion is counted amongthe best works of Safavid art and architecture.9

From the so-called summer residences of theSafavid kings near the Caspian Sea, Farahabad,situated on the coast and now in ruins, may bereconstructed in its outward form with the helpof nineteenth-century drawings, like those of theJahan-numa palace (fig. 10). Its cubically massedshape is rectangular, with a symmetrical divisionof the facade into five sections. The two outer-most ones are n rrower than those in the center.The central section is even broader than theothers, lending it additional importanceThanks to old photographs, both the palace inSafiabad (fig. 11a-b) and the palace of Saahib-iZaman in Ashraf/Behshahr (fig. 12) can be re-constructed in spite of recent changes in the

building. Photographs show a cubic structurewith a basically tripartite facade.

Along the so-called Royal Road from Isfahan tothese countryside palaces on the Caspian Sea sixdesert palaces acting as way stations have comedown to us (fig. 13). Unlike the palaces at Isfahanwith their two or more stories and the two-storypalaces on the Caspian coast, these have only onestory and are often built around a central courtjust like the caravansarays that are often locatednear them. Those at Dombi, Sefid Ab, and Germ-ab (fig. 14) have two courtyards each, recallingthe layout of Seljuq-period royal caravansarays inIran and Anatolia. The courtyards are surround-ed by halls and single rooms that open into themthrough arcades. Architecturally, these halls aredesigned as two-story buildings as they are seenfrom outside, with entrances on the ground floorand above them a line of windows, but insidethere is only a one-story room with walls designedin two stories. The room is covered by vaulting,with small domes in between. The center of eachfacade is accentuated architectonically by an iwan,as in Safavid caravansarays. Some have bent en-trances as at Sefid Ab, to prevent people fromlooking into one court from the other, thusallowing one to function as a selamlik (men'squarters) and the other as a haremlik (women'squarters). Large caravansarays along importanttrade routes may have had double courts, withseveral rooms in one or two corners, for theseparate accommodation of the royal entourageand embassies from abroad. This arrangementcan be found in both Safavid and Qajar caravan-sarays.

Along other highways small pavilions were builtto serve as royal way stations as well as huntinglodges. One such example is the 'Aliabad pavil-ion, with one story (fig. 2)' and nine rooms ofunequal size on a stone platform of 17.5 x 16.7 m(outside measurements) whichwould be too smallto house the whole entourage of a prince. It canbe assumed that they lived in tents in an enclosedarea around the stone pavilion to which only theprince and his closest companions had access.Unfortunately all possible traces of such an enclo-sure have been erased from the terrain by farm-ing. The domed rooms at the center of the 'Alia-bad pavilion are richly ornamented by stellatevaults with intersecting ribs, but their state ofpreservation is too poor to show painting or othervault decoration.

Safavid palaces in Isfahan, Qazvin, and Kashan

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were enclosed by walls which had their own im-pressive gatehouses. Several types of buildingswere used for this function. At the CAli Qapu inIsfahanl' the open loggia (tal&r) is supported bywooden columns standing above the gateway'smonumental ground floor. In Kashan1 2 the gate-houses of the palace and of the Bagh-i Fin gardenbore a strong resemblance to each other, as thesketches of Engelbert Kaempfer reveal (fig. 15).The facades of both buildings had a tripartiteelevation. The heavily modified gatehouse of thepalace quarters in Qazvin, also called the 'AliQapu,'s can be reconstructed (fig. 16) using adrawing by Kaempfer. It had a facade of arcadesor blind arcades similar to those in mosque court-yards and caravansarays.

Building materials used for these structuresranged from mud brick and baked brick (used onthe foundations of quarried stone) to quarriedstone mixed with lime mortar, to square stone, towood. Vaulted ceilings of stone or mud brickwere often richly decorated with painting, carvedstucco, and tiled muqarnas. Carved wooden col-umns and wooden capitals, painted flat woodenceilings, fresco paintings on the walls and ceil-ings, and painted muqarnas were often used forthe interior design of important buildings. Theycan be found in the CAli Qapu and other survivingpavilions at Isfahan, as well as smaller palacessuch as the one in Tajabad and others in the cityof Nayin.14

In contrast to the richly decorated interiors,the outer walls were sparingly decorated in palac-es, caravansarays, and sacred buildings duringthe Safavid period, but their segmented facadeswere well proportioned. In them, structural ele-ments functioned at the same time as decoration.The layout of Safavid palatial buildings is usuallymore harmonious than that of their more recent

Qajar counterparts which show a tendency to-ward exaggeration in design, although they stillfirmly adhere to the building tradition of ancientPersia.

Like religious buildings, palaces influencedthe architecture of those regions that were con-quered and at times governed by the Safavids.Before the Safavid era, Iranian Islamic architec-ture had already influenced neighboring coun-tries. The (inili K6k (Tiled Kiosk) of Mehmet IIin the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul completed in1472 is awell-known example. 15 The Safavid art ofbuilding also influenced palace architecture inGeorgia after its conquest, as can be seen in thepalace of the Palavandishvili in Sagina near Tiflis,built in the seventeenth century. It can be com-pared with the Safavid pavilions along the RoyalRoad from Isfahan to the Caspian Sea. As early asthe sixteenth century the residence of the shah ofNardaran in northern Azerbaijan shows the char-acteristic features seen in later Safavid pavilions,both in its ground plan and its facades.'l

Influences from abroad are hardly discernibleon Safavid buildings with the possible exceptionof the interior design of palace architecture,where European-influenced painted decorationswere widely used. On the mural paintings of theChihil Sutun in Isfahan, for example, courtiers ofboth sexes are represented in typical Europeandress of the seventeenth century.1 7 Itwas not untilthe Qajar period that the influence of Europeanarchitecture was increasingly felt in such interior-design elements as local interpretations of classi-cal columns, capitals, or mirrors (already en-countered in late Safavid architecture).18 Despitetheir rapid incorporation of foreign elements,however, these buildings perpetuated a long-established local tradition of palace architecture.

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9. Henri Stierlin, Ispahan (Geneva, 1976), 72 f.

1. For Qazvin, see Wolfram Kleiss, "Der safavidischePavilion in Qazvin," Archdologische Mitteilungen ausIran (hereafter AM/) 9 (1976): 290-98. Bibliogra-phy on the Isfahan palace is provided in Necipoglu'spaper in this volume.

2. Arthur Upham Pope and Phyllis Ackerman, ASurvey ofPersian Art (Tokyo, 1967), 2:536 f.; LionelBier, Sarvistan: A Study in Early Iranian Architecture(University Park, Penna., 1986).

3. Wolfram Kleiss, "Schloss Aliabad bei Furk in Fars,"AMI24 (1991): 261 f.

4. Kurt Wirfel, Isfahan nisf idschahan, dasistdie Halfteder Welt (Zurich, 1974), 147-54, 160-65.

5. Wolfram Kleiss, "Schl6sser und Herrensitze aufdem Lande aus Safavidischer und QadjarischerZeit," AMI20 (1987): 345 f.

6. I have measured Tajabad, but have not yet pub-lished the results.

7. Hans Hills and Hans Hoppe, E. Kaempferzum 330.Geburtstag (Lemgo, 1982), fig. 32.

10. Kleiss, "Schl6sser und Herrensitze," 358 f.

11. Wuirfel, Isfahan, 118 f.

12. Kleiss, Die Entwicklung von Paldsten und palastarti-gen Wohnbauten in Iran (Vienna, 1989), fig. 67.

13. Kleiss, Die Entwicklung von Palisten, fig. 45.

14. For Nayin, see S. K. Yetkin, Islam Mimarii (Ankara,1959), 421; for further bibliography, see O'Kane'sarticle in this volume.

15. W. Beridse, Die Baukunst des Mittelalters in Georgien(Berlin, 1981), 237 f.

16. K. Gink, Azerbaidjan (Hanau, 1980), 52 f.

17. For the mural paintings in Isfahan and furtherbibliography, see Necipoglu's article in this vol-ume.

18. For Qajar palaces, see J. M. Scarce, "The RoyalPalaces of the Qajar Dynasty: A Survey," in QajarIran, ed. C. E. Bosworth and Carol Hillenbrand(Edinburgh, 1984), 329-51.

8. Kleiss, "Schl6sser und Herrensitze," 365 f.

Notes

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