Five Years in a Persian Town

by Napier Malcolm

Occasionally, as we near the centre of the town, we come across open squares with a small mosque on the one side. The wall of the mosque is dirty white, and there is a little black lettering over the doorway, but very little tile or brick. In the middle there may be a dilapidated octagon with a flat top, about five feet high and six across, built of mud covered with tiles rather the worse for wear. Round such squares there are generally arched recesses, filled in at the bottom, so as to make a ledge three feet from the ground. The bazaars are just the old narrow lanes, covered by a succession of mud domes forming a continuous but untidy roof. The goods are displayed on tiers of mud ledges, and there is a mud room behind. Quantities of the wares are mud. Firepans, barrels for grain, several kinds of toys, bread receptacles, and some other household implements are simply clay, moulded into a rough form, and dried in the sun. Water-bottles, various kinds of pitchers, children’s money-boxes, and hookah-bowls are baked with fire, but without the slightest glaze. The baker’s ovens are made of mud, down to the very doors. Many of the Yezdis even eat mud, and develop an unwholesome muddy complexion.

The cleverness of the Yezdi in manipulating mud is beyond belief. Sometimes you may see men in the streets making barrels for storing grain. First of all a smooth round slab of mud about an inch and a half thick, is moulded on the ground. Then another piece of mud is kneaded into a long sausage, and placed in a hoop upon the edge of the slab. Sausage after sausage is added hoopwise, one on the top of the other, until a height of about four feet has been reached. Each hoop, as it is laid in position, is worked with the hand into smooth connection with the hoop below, and when the barrel is completed there is not the least vestige of a join. The whole is done without wheel or machinery of any kind. A mud lid is added which is soldered on with mud when the barrel is filled.

I have hardly yet succeeded in giving any adequate impression of the untidiness of the streets. The central courtyard of the house is generally a fair-sized garden. For reasons connected with the water supply the inhabitants of the houses are continually altering the level of these places, and large quantities of earth are emptied into the street or carried out of it every day as occasion may arise. All along the sides of the streets there are shallow holes for rubbish heaps; here and there there are cesspools; and yet with all this the streets are so well scavenged by dogs and children that, except in the Jewish quarter, the thoroughfare is comparatively clean, while, thanks to the powerful sun and the absolute absence of moisture in the atmosphere, almost the only obtrusive smells from one end of the town to the other are those that hang round the public baths and the places used by the dyers.

Let us now enter one of the doorways that leads into a better class house. We find ourselves first of all in a round or octagonal porch, covered by a small dome, which is generally pierced in the centre to admit light. From this porch we go through a passage into one of the court-yards. In a good house there are two, or even three court-yards. The whole family live in the better compound, and the men receive their visitors in the smaller one. Though this rule is not without exception, the better class women in Yezd do not seem to have much to complain of in the matter of housing.

In the court-yard there will be found an open tank and some flower-beds; the rest is generally paved. The flower-beds are below the level of the pavement, and are irrigated from the tank. Watering-pots are used for watering the pavement only. Sometimes the whole garden is sunk to the level of the cellar floor, so as to get nearer to the qan’at. The house itself consists of two sets of buildings, chiefly one story, with perhaps one or two upstairs rooms. The upper rooms, however, do not really form a separate story, but are built over the lowest of the ground-floor rooms, so as to bring the roof more or less to one level. The roofs are generally paved with flat bricks of the shape of tiles, and are surrounded by a low mud wall, so as to form a more or less secluded and cool place, where the family may sleep in summer. Perhaps a dome may partially project above the level of the rest of the roof. Also there is the inevitable bād-gīr, or square air-shaft, running down to the back of the big summer portico, or tālār, and furnished at the top with long slits on all four sides to catch any air that may be moving. This talar is the principal room on the summer side, which faces north. It is often built in the form of a cross with very stumpy arms, or rather of an oblong with the corners so taken off as to render it slightly cruciform. The long side of the oblong faces the court-yard, and has no wall at all, but there is a curtain of tent-cloth that moves up and down on pulleys. To the right and left of this sun-blind are short walled-off passages, which are used as entrances. Corresponding to the projecting front part between the passages there is at the back a recess under the bad-gir, completing the cruciform design. The roof is arched into a high dome. The whole talar is raised three feet above the level of the garden, so as to give room for a two-foot upright grating, which is the window of the cellar room underneath. For five months in the year these are the only habitable rooms in a Persian house; and they are both furnished as living-rooms. The rooms on either side of the talar are so like the winter rooms that it is unnecessary to describe them separately.

The whole structure of the place is quite different from that of an English building. Except for enclosing a rough garden the Persian builder hardly ever makes a blank wall. Sometimes the walls of the compound, generally the walls of stables and outhouses, but always the sides of rooms, passages, and porticos consist of a series of arches more or less carefully moulded. In the house, unless they are intended for doors, windows, or cupboards, these arched recesses are filled in to a height of three feet; so that round every Persian room there is a series of ledges, called tāqchas, about the size of a small mantelpiece, generally a span deep, but sometimes very much deeper, and running in instead of running out. If the height of the room will allow it, there is a line of straight moulding above these arches, and above that a second row, usually much shorter than the lower ones. Above that comes a second series of lines of straight moulding, shelving into the arch of the roof, for the ceilings are always constructed on the arch principle, although they are sometimes flattened on the top when it is intended to build an upper room. These arches are built of brick and mud only, without any wood or wooden foundation; and indeed no wood is used in a Yezd house at all, except for doors and windows.

You will find three styles of wall in Persian houses. Sometimes the rough mud is coated over with a smoother surface, either clay and chopped straw, or clay and sand, and the brown colour is left unchanged. In fairly good houses this style is often thought good enough for the summer portico. Very often the angles of the mouldings are pointed with white gypsum, and when ornamental designs in the same fashion are added, the effect is exceedingly pretty. But generally the living rooms in a Persian house are entirely whitened with gypsum, and a moulded design, about an eighth of an inch thick, is made in the centre of the ceiling. These complicated and accurate geometrical designs are produced by the natives with no better tools than a chisel and a bit of string. The formation of the arches and straight mouldings without instruments is equally wonderful, but though the appearance is geometrical two arches never exactly correspond with one another if one comes to measure. Still the construction of a Persian room, perhaps with a large dome, without any better materials than clay, gypsum, and a small modicum of baked brick, without any scaffolding or wooden basis, and with the help of none but the very simplest tools, is a thing that may be accounted one of the most extraordinary marvels of the East.

As in the summer, so in the winter side, the best room is generally in the centre. The better rooms are almost invariably approached from the side and not from the front, being separated from one another by passages that run to the whole depth of the buildings. This enables the entire frontage of the room to be given up to windows. Generally some of the rooms have a large cupboard room at the back, which is frequently used for sleeping in. As the floor of the house is three feet above the level of the compound, the passages between the rooms are furnished with steps, but they have no doors. Consequently, to shift one’s quarters in such a house necessitates going into the open air. The smaller rooms are generally approached from the front, and in this case they sometimes have an aivān, or mud verandah. The winter rooms always take up the north end of the compound, but are often built along the east or west side as well.

Rooms are generally named by the number of their windows, which is usually three or five. A good five-windowed room will have a frontage of five arches filled in with French windows. The semi-circular fanlight consists of pieces of coloured glass fixed together in a wooden lattice. The lattice at a distance resembles fret-work, but is really elaborately pieced together. Some of the older windows contain exceedingly fine work, but even when it is well done it is not very durable, and nowadays they can only do very rough work. Some of the work that is forty or fifty years old is marvellous, but could not be done at the present time for love or money. The French window itself consists of two doors which are supposed to meet in the middle. There are no hinges, but each door has a wooden foot which turns in a mud socket. The arrangement of the coloured glasses which forms the panes is extremely artistic. The same sort of wooden lattice is used, but the pattern is rather larger than the pattern of the fanlight. As may be supposed, it is extremely difficult to keep these windows clean, for the panes, besides being very minute, are simply caught into grooves in the wood; and, as the work is done without any great accuracy, they very seldom fit. The doors are made after the same design as the windows, but they have wooden panels. They are often surmounted by a glazed fanlight. The wood of the doors and windows is covered with a yellowish-brown paint, and warps very badly, as it is used in an unseasoned state. Our cat could generally get in through a bolted door.