Windcatchers & Silence: Five Days in Yazd
In the oldest mud-brick city on earth, the desert teaches a slower way of seeing.
Rooftops and badgirs (windcatchers) at dusk, Yazd.
Leila Hosseini
Iran Correspondent
- Sunset over the badgirs
- The eternal flame at the Ateshkadeh
- Getting lost in the old town
The first thing Yazd takes from you is the noise.
Step off the night bus from Shiraz and into the old town, and the modern world simply stops at the edge of the bazaarcheh. The lanes narrow to the width of two shoulders, walls the colour of toasted bread leaning close overhead.
The architecture of patience
These wind towers — badgirs — are the genius of the desert. Long before electricity, the people of Yazd learned to catch the faintest breath of wind four storeys up and funnel it down into the cool dark of the house.
To build a city in a place that does not want you there is the purest kind of optimism.
You feel that optimism everywhere — in the qanats that carried snowmelt fifty kilometres across open desert, in the courtyards turned inward toward a single pomegranate tree and a rectangle of sky.
Fire that has never gone out
At the Ateshkadeh, a flame burns behind glass said to have been alight since 470 AD. Five days is not enough. But Yazd is not a place you finish — it is a place that recalibrates you.
