Kharanaq

Kharanaq rises out of the desert north of Yazd as a single weathered mass of mud brick: hundreds of rooms, stairways, domes and lanes fused into one hill-shaped settlement, the colour of the earth it was built from. Behind it are bare mountains, in front of it the plain, and below it a green strip of fields and a seasonal river. The old village has been abandoned as its water supply dwindled and its people moved into a new settlement nearby, and the result is one of the most evocative of Iran's mud-brick ghost villages: a place where you can walk through an entire traditional desert community, roofs and walls melting slowly back into the ground.

The heart of the old village is its fortified core, a dense citadel of houses of two and three storeys, with watchtowers and a surrounding wall. Its origins are often traced to the Sasanian period, and local accounts claim a history of settlement stretching back thousands of years; neither can be dated precisely, but the place is certainly very old. Inside, the lanes twist and turn in a deliberately confusing pattern, the story goes to disorient raiders, and many buildings are now collapsed or roofless.

Several buildings have been restored and are the reason most visitors come. The best known is the shaking minaret, a slender clay tower about fifteen metres high, dated to the Seljuk period, with a double spiral stair so narrow that it tapers from about seventy centimetres at the bottom to around forty at the top. Push gently on its upper part and the whole tower begins to sway; why it does so has never been fully explained. Beside it stands a Qajar-era mosque, and at the foot of the village a caravanserai, rebuilt in the Qajar period under a son of Fath-Ali Shah, whose many rooms around a central courtyard show how busy this stop on the desert routes once was. There is also a Qajar bathhouse fed by a qanat, and a small stone bridge, about forty metres long, that seems never to have carried traffic but to have served to channel water from the river to the fields.

The best moments come late in the day, when low sun rakes across the mud walls and the empty village turns gold and then deep ochre, and from the upper lanes you look out over the fields and the desert beyond.

Getting there

Kharanaq lies in Ardakan County in Yazd Province, about 70 km north of the city of Yazd. The nearest airport is Yazd Shahid Sadooghi Airport (AZD), about 61 km away. The village is usually visited by car or taxi from Yazd, often on a day trip that combines it with other sites of the region.