Bishapur

Bishapur is the city a Persian king of kings built to celebrate beating Rome. Shapur I, the second ruler of the Sasanian dynasty, defeated three Roman emperors in his long reign, and the last of them, Valerian, was taken prisoner in 260. A few years later, in about 266 according to an inscription on the site, Shapur founded a new royal city in a green valley of the Zagros foothills in Fars, where the Shapur River leaves its gorge. The city still carries its founder's name.

The plan is a surprise in Iran: a rectangle of roughly two kilometres by one, crossed by two main streets meeting at right angles, in the manner of a Roman or Hellenistic city. It has long been said that Roman captives, engineers among them, helped to build it; Shapur's own inscriptions speak of resettling Roman prisoners in Persian provinces, though how much they shaped Bishapur is still debated. Excavations, first by French archaeologists in the 1930s and later by Iranian teams, have uncovered a palace with a great cross-shaped hall, stucco decoration and floor mosaics of court ladies and musicians in a style that mixes Roman technique with Persian subjects. Some of the finest panels are now in the Louvre and in the National Museum of Iran.

The most haunting building is the so-called Temple of Anahita, a square stone chamber sunk several metres into the ground. A channel brought water from the river so that it flowed around the inner court, and many scholars read it as a shrine to the goddess of waters. Only a small part of the city has been excavated, and most of it still lies under fields and low mounds.

Just outside the walls the river runs through the narrow gorge of Tang-e Chogan, where Sasanian sculptors carved six great rock reliefs. The best known shows Shapur on horseback in triumph over Rome, with a kneeling emperor before him. Higher up the mountain, a cave holds a colossal statue of the king, several metres tall, carved from a natural stalagmite. Since 2018 the city, the gorge and the cave have been part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Sassanid Archaeological Landscape of Fars Region.

Getting there

Bishapur lies in Fars province, about 8 km from the small town of Qaemiyeh and some 20 km from the larger town of Kazerun, on the main road between Shiraz and the Gulf coast. The nearest airport in a straight line is Gachsaran (GCH), about 94 km away, but most travellers arrive through Shiraz Shahid Dastgheib International Airport (SYZ), roughly 100 km to the east, and continue by road via Kazerun.