Someone forwarded this to me. Registration is required for the Friday Times so the link may not work. Registration’s free.
This may be part of a series of articles regarding these gardens, so i’ll post more if they publish any next week. It’s a long read but pretty interesting especially with the handful of pictures (albeit small in size). Image captions are theirs.
Lost gardens of Islam, KK Aziz, Friday Times, 31 October 2003
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Garden of Shiraz, once like a vision in the journey of the soul
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A day for the garden, by Mahesh
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Water, stone and verdure in Kashan’s Bagh-i-Fin
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Central pavilion set in Akbar’s garden
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Creating beauty: Babur’s Bagh-i-Vafa
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18th century view of Iranian garden
Believing that a beautiful thing should be called by a beautiful name and making full use of the melody of the Persian language, the great garden builders chose for their creations names of extraordinary beauty and evocative power. Some titles on this resonant roll-call are Bagh-i-Chinar (garden of plane trees), Bagh-i-Ahu (garden of the deer), Bagh-i-Murad (garden of desire), Bagh-i-Nazar (garden of sight).
While bedecking his capital, Samarqand, Timur chose to enhance the glory of its great mosques and monuments with a garland of gardens. These pleasure places, gardens with pavilions, were given such evocative names as Bagh-i-Khalwat (garden of privacy), Bagh-i-Dilkusha (garden of heart’s ease), Bagh-i-Naqsh-i-Jahan (garden of the picture of the world) and Bagh-i-Duldulay (garden of the black throne).
Still not content, he further encircled the city with a necklace of gardens. Settlements were named after the greatest cities of the Islamic world – Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, Sultaniya and Shiraz. When Clavijo approached the city in 1403 he found that “so numerous were the gardens and vineyards surrounding Samarqand that a traveller who approaches the city sees only a mountainous height of trees, and the houses embowered among them remain invisible”.
Then Clavijo describes the gardens in which he was entertained by his host. About one he writes: “We found it to be enclosed by a high wall, which in its circuit may measure a full league round, and within it is full of fruit trees of all kinds, save only limes and citron-trees which we noticed to be lacking. Further there are here six great tanks, for throughout the orchard is conducted a great stream of water, passing from end to end: while leading from one tank to the next they have planted five avenues of trees, very lofty and shady which appear as streets, for they are paved to be like a platform. These quarter the orchard in every direction, and off the main five avenues other smaller roads are led to variegate the plan, enabling the whole orchard to be traversed and very conveniently seen in all parts. In the exact centre there is a hill, built up artificially of clay brought hither by hand: it is very high and its summit is a small level place that is enclosed by a palisade of wooden stakes. Within this enclosure are built several very beautiful palaces, each with its complement of chambers magnificently ornamented in gold and blue, the walls being panelled with tiles of these and other colours … Throughout the orchard there are to be seen many deer, which Timur has caused to be caught and brought hither, and there are pheasants here in great abundance. From this orchard you go out to a great vineyard beyond which likewise is surrounded by its wall, and this vineyard is of equal extent to the orchard. Round and about the walls of both the orchard and the vineyard they have planted many tall and beautiful trees which give the whole a very fine effect. The name by which this place is known is Talicia, and in their tongue they also call it Khalvet.” In all probability this was the Bagh-i-Khalwat (garden of privacy), but he thought the Bagh-i-Nau (new garden) loveliest of them all.
Some more information on Samarqand’s gardens is to be found in a modern biography of Timur. The Paradise Garden was made for Tuman Agha, the 12-year-old daughter of a Chaghtai nobleman whom Timur married in 1378. The Bagh-i-Dilkusha was laid out for Tukal Khanum, Timur’s second queen, and its pavilion-palace had a cupola covered with mosaics. The walks in the garden were lined with sentinel-like sycamores, and each section of the garden was planted with a different kind of tree, some for their fruit and some for their foliage or flower. The Garden of the North was built in honour of a daughter of Miranshah in about 1396, and Timur had personally supervised the building of its palace. “The corner-stones of the palace were made from Tabriz marble, the courtyards were also paved with marble, and the exterior walls covered with porcelain. The interior was painted with frescoes by the best artists of Persia and Iraq.” These gardens, numbering 15 or 16 in all as reported by contemporary visitors, were as large as parks, and were divided into four or sixteen squares, with palaces erected where the avenues crossed. They were “filled with lawns, flowerbeds, shaded walks, fruit trees, pools, streams, and pavilions”. Timur, whom most historians remember only as a shedder of blood and conqueror of half the world, had the humanity and grace to order that during his absence the gardens were to be thrown open to the public. As he was away on campaigns for most of the year and sometimes two or three years at a stretch, the people of Samarqand enjoyed the privilege of tasting the delights and the fruits of these havens of tranquillity.
These glories of Central Asia weathered many a century of rapine and ravage, and yet the travellers who were there in the nineteenth century speak of the presence of some faint remnants of the paradise that once was there, and of the continued habit of the people to spend their leisure on its green lawns and under its shady trees.
Eugene Schuyler was in Tashkent in 1873, and reported: “During the summer all who can afford it leave their town houses and remove to one of the numerous gardens in the suburbs, where they either have a small house of a similar kind or live in Kirghiz kibitkas. Nothing can be more delightful than this. The heat does not penetrate through the thick elms and poplars; a freshness constantly exhales from the square pond and from the canals which water the garden, mixed with the perfume of roses and syringas.” He went on: “Outside the walls [of Tashkent] – and the town is about six miles across – the gardens extend for several miles. These gardens, which are thickly planted with trees, and at a distance entirely conceal the town, are still very beautiful, though they have greatly suffered since the Russian occupation.”
…] Some records of Persian gardens, particularly of the Safavid age, are still available, though the places themselves lie obliterated by war and tumult or have shrunk to fragments of their original size. In the absence of the original creations, the best course is to see them through the eyes of those who beheld them in their full splendour and recorded their impressions.
Thomas Herbert, an Englishman of twenty years and one, arrived in Shiraz at the end of the February of the year 1628, and was taken in by the “many, and both large and beautiful” gardens of the city. They abound, he wrote, “in lofty pyramidical cypresses, broad-spreading chenars, tough elms, straight ash, knotty pines, fragrant mastics, kingly oaks, sweet myrtles, useful maples; and of fruit trees are grapes (whose wood, though of little worth, some say never rots), pomegranates, pomecitrons, oranges, lemons, pistachios, plums, almond, figs, dates, and melons of both exceeding fair and of incomparable sweetness; also flowers rare to the eye, sweet to the smell, and useful in physic!”
Two hundred and fifty-nine years later, another young Englishman, Edward Granville Browne descended upon Shiraz from its northern flank. He was aged twenty-five and had been freshly elected to a fellowship at Pembroke College in the University of Cambridge. Fluent in the Persian tongue, he was destined to devote his entire life to the study of the people and literature of Iran. As he beheld Shiraz, the sight that he saw struck him speechless as if he beheld a vision in a journey of the spirit. “Suddenly we turned a corner, and in that moment – a moment of which the recollection will never fade from my mind – there burst upon my delighted gaze a view the like of which (in its way) I never saw … At our feet, in a grassy, fertile plain girt with purple hills (on the loftiest summits of which the snow still lingered), and half concealed amidst gardens of dark stately cypresses, wherein the rose and the judas-tree in luxuriant abundance struggled with a host of other flowers for the mastery of colour, sweet and beautiful in its garb of spring verdure which clothed the very roofs of the bazaars, studded with many a slender minaret, and many a turquoise-hued dome, lay the home of Persian culture, the mother of Persian genius, the sanctuary of poetry and philosophy. Shiraz … Words cannot describe the rapture which overcame me, after many a weary march, I gazed at length on the reality of that whereof I had so long dreamed, and found the reality not merely equal to, but far surpassing, the ideal which I had conceived.” The garden referred to by both Herbert and Browne is said to have been the Bagh-i-Takht or the “garden of the throne”. Such is the awe that the gardens of Islam could awake in the eyes of even the weary traveller.
But if it hadn’t been for the person who forwarded it to me, i would probably never have read it.
i think i owe you a big thanks.