Golestan Palace

Golestan, the "Palace of Flowers", is what remains of the walled citadel around which Tehran grew into a capital. Its core goes back to the Safavid period, when Shah Tahmasp I built a fortified enclosure here in the sixteenth century and Abbas the Great later added a garden. Karim Khan Zand reworked it in the eighteenth century, but the complex as it looks today is essentially Qajar: Agha Mohammad Khan made Tehran his seat at the end of the 1700s, and the palace became the dynasty's residence and stage for more than a century. Much of the present fabric dates from a rebuilding completed in 1865 under the architect Haji Abol-Hasan Mimar Navai. UNESCO listed the ensemble in 2013.

What makes Golestan unforgettable is the way Persian craft meets nineteenth-century Europe. The courtyard facades are sheathed in painted glazed tiles, and the interiors glitter with ayeneh-kari, the Iranian technique of setting thousands of small mirror fragments into faceted vaults so that a room dissolves into light. The Mirror Hall is the famous example, a room the court painter Kamal-ol-Molk made the subject of one of his best-known works. Elsewhere the Windcatcher Mansion, built under Fath-Ali Shah and reworked under Naser al-Din Shah, keeps its tall tiled towers that once pulled air down into the rooms below.

Two structures deserve slow looking. The Marble Throne, set in an open veranda facing the garden, was commissioned by Fath-Ali Shah in 1805 and assembled from 65 pieces of yellow marble quarried near Yazd; its platform rests on carved figures of men, women, fairies and demons. The Shams-ol-Emareh, the "Edifice of the Sun", went up in 1865–67 as a tall pavilion with twin towers from which the court could look out over the city, a building meant to announce a modern capital; a clock sent by Queen Victoria to Naser al-Din Shah was mounted on it. Nearby, the small Karim Khani nook preserves the older, more intimate scale of the Zand era, and the complex also holds the royal collections of gifts, crafts and early photographs, a reminder that Naser al-Din Shah was an enthusiastic photographer and that the whole household posed for the camera.

The palace kept its ceremonial role into the twentieth century: Reza Shah was crowned here in 1926 and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1967.

Getting there

Golestan Palace stands in the historic centre of Tehran, about 1.6 km from the city's central reference point, beside the northwestern edge of the Grand Bazaar. The nearest airport is Mehrabad International Airport (THR), roughly 9.6 km away. The easiest approach is by Tehran Metro Line 1 to 15 Khordad (Panzdah-e Khordad) station, from which the palace entrance is a short walk.