Nashtifan Windmill Complex
Interesting facts
- The great wall at Nashtifan holds about two dozen mills, and around thirty similar windmills survive in the surrounding area.
- The Persian geographer Estakhri described windmills working in Khorasan as early as the 9th century.
- Persian vertical-axis windmills of this kind were first built to pump water and only later adapted to grind grain.
- A medieval anecdote places windmills in the time of Caliph Umar (634–644), though it was written down only in the 10th century and is doubted.
- From Persia the vertical-axle design spread widely, reaching southern Europe by the 11th century and appearing in 13th-century China.
Why it is worth it
On a bare, wind-scoured plain in the far east of Khorasan, close to the Afghan frontier, a row of tall mud-brick walls stands shoulder to shoulder like the ribs of some enormous beast. These are the asbads of Nashtifan: windmills built from clay, straw and timber, rising to roughly twenty metres, and generally reckoned to be around a thousand years old in their lineage. The village name is usually explained as a compression of words meaning "storm's sting", and the place lives up to it — the mills exist because of the ferocious seasonal gale that sweeps across the region for about four months of the year, the wind locals call the 120-day wind.
What makes them extraordinary is not only their age but their principle. European windmills catch the wind on sails that turn a horizontal shaft; the Persian design stands that idea on its head. Here the blades — bundles of wooden slats — are mounted on an upright wooden axle hidden behind the high clay walls, which shield one side of the rotor and channel the wind into the other. The blades are pushed round like a revolving door, and because the shaft is vertical it drives the millstone below directly, with no gearing at all. Engineering historians trace this drag-driven, vertical-axis type back to Persian inventions of the first millennium, which makes Nashtifan one of the very few places where the oldest family of windmills can still be seen turning.
The effect in person is architectural as much as mechanical: a long, sculptural façade of earthen piers, the dark slatted rotors visible in the gaps, and the grinding rooms tucked in at ground level. Iran listed the complex as a national heritage site in 2002. For years the mills were kept working by a single elderly custodian, Mohammad Etebari, who repaired the blades and ground grain for neighbours long after easier ways of making flour had arrived — a reminder that a monument like this survives only as long as someone knows how to keep it moving.
Getting there
Nashtifan lies about 16 km from the town of Khvāf (Khaf) in Razavi Khorasan province, reached by local road. The nearest airport is Birjand International Airport (XBJ), roughly 190 km away by straight line; from there the journey continues overland via Khaf.
On these lists
34.43222, 60.17472per Wikidata