The Muslim world has many mosques known as "Friday Mosques." This is a translation of "jami' masjid"---a mosque for Friday, the day of assembly. The Friday Mosque in Isfahan, a city renowned for elegant architecture, is one of the oldest mosques in Iran. Though construction was continuous throughout centuries, the mosque is primarily a work of the period of Seljuk rule in the 11th and 12th centuries. Its intricate stonework, blue domes and slender minarets attest to Persia's flourishing Islamic culture in centuries past.
Shiraz, the capital of Fars province, is the artistic heart of Iran. The city maintains monuments to its two great poets, Sa'di and Hafez, whose writings transformed the ancient dialect of Fars into what became the foundation of modern Persian. Sa'di's mausoleum is a high, domed structure nestled into a garden ringed by cypress trees. The Tomb of Hafez lies under an ornate pavilion on the site of the Golgast-e Mosalla, the pleasure garden immortalized in Hafez' poetry.
The ancient Persians, ruled by the Achaemenid kings Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes, built elaborate palaces for their kings and temples to their Zoroastrian gods. The Achaemenid capital, Persepolis, enjoyed a brief golden age before being looted and destroyed by Alexander the Great in 330 B.C.E. The site, located about 40 miles northeast of Shiraz, was buried for centuries and was not excavated until the 1930s. The unearthed ruins of Persepolis preserve the regal skeleton of a once-opulent civilization.
Iran's more recent architecture expresses the country's struggle to reconcile tradition with globalization and modernization. The tower in Tehran's Azadi ("freedom") Square fuses ancient style with modern ingenuity. A gateway to Iran's capital city, the massive structure rises in sweeping diagonal lines from a starkly modernist base. These lines converge in a vaulted archway that radiates an intricate diamond pattern inherited from traditional Persian architecture.
