In xanadu, p.13
In Xanadu, page 13
'Why do you stay?' I asked.
'Many of us have gone,' replied Tadios. 'As many as thirty thousand have fled, either to the USSR or to Syria. After the Jews were expelled our people were frightened. But most remain. We have to weather the storm. We Armenians have been in Tabriz for thousands of years, always ruled by others. We have suffered worse than this. We will survive. We are a resilient people.'
Tadios got up and poured three glasses of tea from the samovar. He put a sugar lump between his teeth and sipped the tea through it. When he had finished he continued.
'Sometimes I am worried, though,' he said. He spoke slowly, choosing his words carefully. 'For the last century or so there has seen some sort of consensus across the world as to how civilized men behave. You know. There is agreement that men should not be killed for peacefully believing in an idea, that every man deserves a fair, impartial trial, that all men have a right to express what they think. Often these values have been ignored, but however evil a government may be, it has always paid lip service to them.'
He refilled our glasses.
'Well it's different in Iran now. The Ayatollah does not believe that all men are free or equal. He does not believe in human rights. He accepts only the morality of the Koran. For the first time in modern history a government has built as its bedrock the idea that all men are in bondage to Allah. That frightens me very much.'
The conversation in the bookshop left us in a gloomy mood. We wandered back to the hotel through pavements full of women in chador and khaki-clad Revolutionary Guards. On the street corners men were selling cassettes of the Ayatollah's sermons. Revolutionary tricolours fluttered half-heartedly in the breeze. On the way, we stopped in at the Azerbaijan Museum to see the famous gallery of Sassanian sculpture, but the display had been cleared away. The museum authorities had replaced it with a room full of line upon line of spectacles and false teeth. They belonged, so we were told, to the fallen 'Martyrs of the Revolution'.
The first time I awoke that night, the room was quiet, it was neither too hot nor too cold, and I could not understand what had woken me. Then, rolling over, I noticed the bump in the bed. It was not a wrinkled sheet. Nor did it seem to be the mattress. I felt under the bed. It was not a broken spring. I got out, turned on the lamp and lifted up the mattress. There lay an empty bottle of Glenfiddich whisky. I slung it away and went back to sleep.
The second time, I knew exactly what it was that had woken me. I sat bolt upright, muttered 'shit!' and streaked out of the room, up the corridor to the lavatory at the far end. I only just made it in time. It must have been the dubious chelo-kebab I had eaten the night before, or perhaps the cloudy water in the restaurant at Maku. When Laura awoke the following morning (predictably quite untouched by my bacillus) I was able to announce that I had 'been' seven times in as many hours. The news seemed to restore her spirits somewhat.
You mustn't eat anything this morning,' she said. This afternoon you may have a small bowl of yoghurt. The bacteria in it will help fight whatever is in your stomach. On no account take any antibiotics. They will only weaken your resistance in the future and we can't have the expedition delayed any more than it is already.'
Laura spent the morning exploring while I trotted up and down the corridor. Languishing in bed I felt empty and weak and ill and sorry for myself. I wondered if I had a temperature. Perhaps I had dysentery. Perhaps I had caught one of those worms that you hear about in medical jokes. Some could grow thirty feet long; others made you go blind. To try and take my mind off my stomach I opened The Travels, but only found that Polo had suffered the same fate as I: 'The water causes violent and excessive purging,' he writes, 'nigh ten times a day.'
I turned to Robert Byron. The Road To Oxiana had done more than anything to lure me to Persia in the first place, and was always favourite reading in moments of depression. Tabriz, I saw, was the scene of one of Byron's funniest playlets (the Ghiboon! Ghiboon! muleteers), but the town of his description bore little resemblance to that I could see from my window. The 'plush-coloured mountains approached by lemon-coloured foothills' were now obscured by the decaying skyscrapers, windows boarded up with black eye-patches. The 'bronze statue of Marjoribanks in a cloak' must have come down with the Revolution, and disappeared along with the 'drinkable white wine and disgusting beer'. At least there was no sign of the athletic fleas which had disabled his companion. Christopher Sykes.
Laura returned at lunchtime. She marched over to my bed, felt the temperature of my brow and declared me cured.
'What you need,' she said, 'is some exercise. While you've been asleep, I have been doing some research. I went back to our Armenian friends and checked Polo's notes on Tabriz. The "charming gardens" have all gone, and according to Tadios the Armenians have given up weaving and handicrafts in favour of ectronics and computers. But silk weaving still goes on in a village called Osku on the outskirts of town. Why don't you go off and discover it?' 'I'm not up to it.'
"You most certainly are. A little diarrhoea never did anyone any harm. Here, I've bought you some kaolin and morphine to keep you corked up.'
'Are you not coming too?'
'No. I thought I might stay behind and read. But make sure you are back by six. I've got tickets for the evening coach to Zanjan.'
On the bus to Osku. feeling like death and bunged up with enough kaolin and morphine to constipate the entire Iranian army, I cursed my weakness. Why did I always take the line of least resistance? But it was too late now. I arrived in Osku with an effective Persian vocabulary of one word. I got out of the bus and said it.
'Abricham;
Around me were scenes of mid-afternoon torpor. Old men lay sprawled about in the shade of a tree. Some sipped tea through sugar lumps held in theirteeth. It was very hot. A few of the old men looked up, but no one answered me. I took a glass of tea from a ragged chai-khana boy, and slumped down against the bark. Now was no time for battling against language problems.
An hour later the sun had sunk a little lower and I tried again.
'Abricham,' I said.
The old man next to me shrugged his shoulders.
'Abricham; I said again.
This time, for some reason, it worked.
'Abricham?' said the Persian.
'Abricham; I replied.
The old man muttered to his neighbour and a Chinese whisper passed around the tree. One of the younger old men on the far side of the trunk was deputed to guide me. The man got up, shook the dust from his flat cap, and led on through a maze of mud walls. I followed. After a few minutes we arrived at a small wicket gate set low in the wall. The old man knocked, waited, then knocked again. There was the sound of footsteps and the gate opened. A tall man in his late thirties came out. The old man rattled away in guttural dialect, pointed at me, shrugged his shoulders then grunted. The tall man smiled and extended his hand.
'How do you do?' he said. 'My name is Salim. I am the village schoolmaster. This old man says that you are a crazy foreigner who keeps repeating the same word over and over again. What do you want?'
'I'm looking forthe silk farm. The word I kept repeating was Ahricham.'
'Abricham?
'Abricham. Farsi for silk.'
'Oh I see. I am sorry. You see most people around Tabriz speak Turkish. No one here understands a word of Farsi.'
Salim took me to the silk farm. It was another backyard affair, although by necessity a silk loom was a more complicated machine than the simple carpet loom we had seen outside Sivas. It lay in a small semi-subterranean mud-brick hut, attached to a courtyard house in a distant part of the maze. The silk was already wound onto seven weighted spindle whorls which Salim said came from a village nearby. The silk was spun out across the full five-foot width of the loom frame into a sheet of separate threads. At the far end a single man sat on a bench. He operated the entire machine. Two pedals alternately lifted and lowered two frames of tightly strung cross-threads. A chain shot a shuttlecock in between, across the width of the loom, carrying a line of silk alternately under and over the spread of silk threads. A comb then pulled the woven material towards the operator where it wound itself around a wooden roll.
The machine was completely unmotorized and apparently homemade. Its existence near Tabriz, where Polo talks of the weaving of'many kinds of beautiful and valuable stuffs of silk and gold, again proves Polo's accuracy in all matters mercantile, although since the time of Yule that has never really been in doubt. I was shown the finished dyed silks and to the inexpert eye they looked exceptionally fine.
I was on the verge of haggling for a piece but, looking at my watch, I saw the time and rushed back to the square to catch the next bus back into town. It was never wise to anger Laura unnecessarily.
Sleep was impossible in the evening coach. We bumped along minor roads, stopping every half-hour at chai-khana. A sermon gabbled on the tannoy. We arrived at Zanjan thoroughly exhausted, well after midnight. Two hoteliers refused to take us; a third showed us to a windowless cubbyhole covered in graffiti. He said he had been to Aberdeen ten years before, and he smelt as if he had not washed since. To be fair to him there did not seem to be any provision for so doing in the hotel.
The next morning we rose early and caught a minibus filled with angry old women. Our destination was Sultaniya, now a deserted, crumbling spread of ruins, but once the capital of Mongol Persia. From it was ruled an empire which spread from the Oxus to the Euphrates.
When Polo passed through Persia on his outward journey the town had not yet been built and its site was still occupied by the cornfields of the Qongqur-Oleng, the brown meadows. But by 1324, when Polo died, the town had a population of well over a million. Sultaniya was built to the command of Ilkhan Uljetu, the great-great-great-grandson of Ghengis Khan, a Claudius-figure known to his family as 'the Muleteer' and distinguished in history books by his wide-ranging interest in religion. Born a Nestorian Christian and baptized Nicholas, he became in turn a Shamanist, a Buddhist and a Shi'ite Muslim, before finally converting to the Sunni faith. Having professed every available religion, he died of a digestive disorder in 1316.
Sultaniya was his great love. Much of his childhood had been spent hunting in its rich pastures, and in 1305 work began on what he intended to be the largest and most magnificent city in the world. Walls were built. 30,000 paces in circumference, and within, a network of streets rose up as if by magic. Nobles and officials were encouraged to build palaces for themselves and houses for their peasants. The vizier, the historian Rashid ad-Din, built a whole suburb which he modestly named Rashiddya after himself. It contained twenty-four caravanserai, a magnificent mosque, two minarets, a college, a hospital, fifteen hundred shops, over 'thirty thousand fascinating houses, salubrious baths, pleasant gardens, factories for paper and cloth-weaving, a dye mill and a mint'. Craftsmen and merchants were forcibly moved to the town, and each profession was assigned its own street. An idea was mooted to make Sultaniya a centre of pilgrimage. Uljetu began to build an enormous mausoleum in the centre of the town, intended for the bodies of the two most important saints of the Shi'ite world, Hussein and Ali. Only his conversion to Sunni Islam stalled the plan, which would have turned Sultaniya into a Shi'ite Mecca. The mausoleum became his own tomb.
Soon the place began to prosper. The historian Mustawfi said that nowhere in the world were there such fine buildings. The bazaars had no equal in the whole Mongol Empire.
Everything imaginable could be found there. Precious
stones and costly spices from India; turquoises from
Khurasan and Ferghana; lapis lazuli and rubies from
Badakhshan; pearls from the Persian Gulf; silk from
Gilan and Mazandaran; indigo from Kirman, the won-derful textiles of Yazd; cloth from Lombardy and
Flanders, raw silk, brocade, lacquer, oils, musk, Chi-
nese rhubarb, Arab hounds, Turkish falcons, the stallions of Hijaz
There was even a Catholic archbishop.
Yet the prosperity was illusory. Magnificent as it was, Sultaniya was the creation of one man and it died with him. The day Uljetu was buried fourteen thousand families left the town. They had been forced to live there on the whim of a foreign ruler, and they took the first possible opportunity to leave.
Cool and pleasant in summer, it was unbearably cold the rest of the year. There was an inadequate water-supply. It layoff the main Silk Route and was soon bypassed by merchants after they ceased to be forcibly rerouted there. Its star waned quickly. Uljetu's successors chose Tabriz as their capital. The population of Sultaniya drifted off; their mud-brick houses were washed away. It was not even a ghost town. The whole city simply disappeared. Only the vast mausoleum of Uljetu remained.
The first thing we saw was the great turquoise dome flashing in the early morning sun. It stood in the middle of an expanse of flat pastureland, completely alone, an artificial mountain of brick and tile. The minibus did not stop anywhere near it. It lay two miles off the main road and we had to walk.
The tomb would be an extraordinary building in any age, but as the first great monument to emerge from the ashes of the Mongol invasions it must rank as one of the supreme achievements of Mediaeval Man. The mausoleum was built only fifty years after the medresse at Sivas, but a great gulf separates the two. The architect not only equalled anything ever built in the Golden Age of the Seljuks, he completely surpassed it. He made the leap from the crude mediaeval splendour of Seljuk architecture to the subtle classicism that would reach its finest flowering in Mogul India. Already, in 1320, every idea in the Taj was fully expressed here in the plains east of Tabriz. The Taj is simply a refinement of Sultaniya; in its essentials it is restating an idea three hundred years old. Robert Byron wrote that the audacity of Uljetu's inventiveness made him think of Brunelleschi, but in fact there is no comparable leap in European architecture. It is as if St Peter's were to follow fifty years after Chartres.
The mausoleum is octagonal, rising to a parapet from which springs a crown of eight minarets and a bee-hive dome. The sides of the octagon are not equal. There is a main front, once the climax of the Mall of Sultaniya. On it a central doorway is flanked by six blind arches, three on each side, once filled with faience-work inlay. The wall of tobacco-brick rises up to an open, arcaded gallery. This, as Byron pointed out, is a facade, a new departure in Islamic architecture. It was built primarily to be looked at. Unlike almost all earlier Islamic buildings which were bounded by walls and faced inwards, the tomb of Uljetu is centred on the dome and looks out. It is a public building, built at the centre of an imperial capital, a concrete expression of the Emperor's power.
With its city decayed and its empire fallen, there could be something almost pathetic about so proud and vain a monument. Yet the building still retains great dignity and power. This is especially so of the interior. Nothing, except perhaps Hagia Sophia, prepares one for the sheer scale of the vast, unsupported, heavenward-thrusting dome. It encloses an enormous space, far greater than one would expect from the outside. It dwarfs the observer.
Because of this it is only gradually that one notices the fabulous detail of the stucco. Some of the colours and motifs are familiar from Seljuk tile work, yet as with the architecture the whole spirit of the design has been transformed. It is as fine and intricate as a lace ruff. In this subtlety, in the delicate pale colours and nervous, vibrant patterns, lies the key to the entire building. There is an unmistakable Central Asian or even Chinese spirit at work. Certainly those impulses are crossed with the native traditions, but their contribution is clear. For all the destruction wrought by the Mongols, Pax Mongolica allowed an unprecedented flow of artists and intellectuals over the length of the empire. When the apparently barren Mongol tree burst into flower in the early fourteenth century, it did so with a brilliance derived from cross-fertilization. It was from this fusion that all future Persian art would develop.
We wandered around the building all morning. To me, as remarkable as the structure itself was the eclecticism it revealed in the society that created it. As I circled beneath the dome I thought of the people who made up that world, who controlled the forces that must have been beginning to make themselves felt when Polo was here. Uljetu himself is a shadowy figure, clearly a great patron, but personally naive, even ridiculous. His vizier, Rashid ad-Din, however, can still be seen in sharp focus. Many of his writings and a large number of his letters have survived, and he emerges as a sort of symbol for the curiosity and learning of his age.
Born of a Jewish family, he converted to Islam and entered the household of the Ilkhans. He gradually rose in the service and finally became vizier under Uljetu. The post gave him enormous power and extraordinary wealth; in lands alone his private empire stretched from orchards and vineyards in Azerbaijan, through date palm plantations in southern Iraq to water meadows and cornfields in Anatolia. But his letters do not reveal him to be an ambitious sycophant. He was above all an intellectual, and it is his love of learning rather than his statesmanship that emerges most clearly in his correspondence. For such a powerful man there is a surprisingly donnish tone to his letters. He writes to one friend from India thrilled at his discovery of spices unavailable in Persia. To another he extends an invitation to visit a garden he has just made at Fathabad. He sends 'fowls, honey and yoghurt' to a monastery and 'choice garments and a horse' to a scholar who has dedicated a book to him. To his sons he takes a sterner attitude. He writes to one regretting that the boy is occupying himself with astrology (Rashid had just appointed him Governor of Baghdad, and thought there should be more pressing concerns on his mind); another receives a sermon warning him against sloth, wine-drinking and over-fondness for music and dissipation'.
