A bit of Christianity to start off the day... We take a taxi to New Jolfa and visit the Armenian Orthodox Church, Kalisa-ye Vank. The church is over 400 years old and recently restored. The interior frescoes are quite dramatic, but beautiful in their colours and precision... Hell, Earth and Heaven on the left wall, a series of saint’s martyrdom images along the bottom rim of the paintings ... and incense lamps hanging from the ceiling.
The building opposite houses a very interesting museum exhibiting religious paintings, as well as objects typical of Armenian religious and everyday life and first copies of the Bible dating back to bertween the 10th and 14th centuries hand-written in ancient Armenian script. The museum also has a section dedicated to the massacre in 1915 of 1.5 million Armenians living in Turkey at the hands of the Ottomans whilst the world was busy fighting World War I, a tragedy the gravity of which Turkey still today refuses to recognise. Many Armenians took refuge in Syria, Iran, Lebanon, as well as France, the US and Latin America.
We cross onto the Northern shore again and visit the Kakh-e Chehel Sotun Shah’s palace. An impressive building overlooking a long pool and surrounded by a beautiful Persian garden (UNESCO protected). The entrance terrace is magnificent – ornate inlay work on a ceiling supported by 20 carved wooden columns, followed by a mirrored entrance door leading into the inner reception room and its wall paintings depicting battle and sumptuous reception scenes of Safavid kings respectively against or with Azerbaijani, Indian and Turkmen kings and their entourage.
We now return to the most beautiful square in the world (after Piazza Navona in Rome of courseJ) to visit the majestic buildings overlooking Naqsh-e Jahan. We start with the Masjed-e Lotfollah, built by Shah Abbas I’s and completed in 1619. In the main prayer hall of the mosque I stand in awe at the vision around me. It is the most beautiful mosque I have ever seen, surpassing in my mind both the Agia Sofia and the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. It may not be as impressive as these in terms of its dimensions, but the interplay of yellow and blue tile work, mosaics, geometric shapes, Arabic script covering the walls and dome with rays of light streaming through the latticed arched windows creates a unique portrait and atmosphere which is transfixing. Still amazed and dazed by this sight we head back to Naqsh-e Jahan....
Unfortunately the largest mosque on the square, the Masjed-e Shah is closed for Friday prayer. We manage to get into the entrance hall after lots of smiling and pleases with the guard (funnily enough a lady comes along and scolds the guard for letting us in), but it is just a taste, we’ll have to sneak a visit in tomorrow morning before we head for the desert. We spend the rest of the afternoon exploring the tea houses in the alleys around the square.
For dinner we decide to head for the Armenian quarter, where we meet Lorenzo, an Italian traveller who spends half of the year working as a mountain guide on the volcanic island of Stromboli in Sicily and the rest of the year discovering the world.
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