Tabriz Bazaar
Interesting facts
- The complex contains more than 5.5 kilometres of covered bazaar lanes, making it one of the largest roofed markets in the world.
- After the devastating earthquake of 1780, rebuilding began under the governor Najaf Qoli Khan and continued from the Zand era into the Qajar period.
- Some of the best-known parts, including the Mozaffarieh timcheh, the Amir Sara and the Hajj Sheikh Bazaar, were added during that post-earthquake rebuilding.
- For about a century the Mozaffarieh timcheh has hosted the bazaar's five-day mourning ceremonies of Tasua and Ashura, which give the hall its particular fame.
- In the carpet section, hand-woven rugs are traditionally grouped by the size and type of their knots.
- The bazaar was officially protected in 1975, and from 2000 its crumbling brick halls were restored with the shopkeepers themselves as partners.
- That merchant-led rehabilitation won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2013 and helped revive building skills that had been all but lost.
- UNESCO credits the bazaar's centuries of trade not only to its position on the east-west routes but to a shrewd system of endowments and tax exemptions.
- Besides Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, the seventeenth-century French traveller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier also described the market.
Why it is worth it
The historic bazaar of Tabriz is a city within a city: a dense network of covered lanes, domed halls, courtyards and caravanserais, built of brick and roofed with long rows of vaults and domes. It is one of the most complete examples of a traditional Iranian bazaar, combining trade with mosques, schools, bathhouses and lodging for merchants, and in 2010 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as the Tabriz Historic Bazaar Complex, covering some 29 hectares in the centre of the city.
Tabriz has been a place of exchange since antiquity, and its bazaar became one of the great commercial centres of the Silk Road. The city was capital of the Mongol Ilkhanate from 1265, flourishing under Ghazan Khan, and served as the first capital of Safavid Iran from 1501. Travellers recorded the market across the centuries, from Marco Polo in the thirteenth century and Ibn Battuta around 1330 to the seventeenth-century French jeweller Jean Chardin. Earthquakes repeatedly struck the city, including those of 1641, 1721 and 1780, and much of the brick fabric seen today dates from rebuilding in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Each section of the bazaar specialises. The Amir Bazaar is the street of gold and jewellery; the Mozaffarieh is devoted to hand-woven carpets; others were given over to shoemakers or produce. Between the lanes open timchehs, roofed courtyards for wholesale trade, alongside caravanserais that once lodged travelling merchants and their goods. The bazaar remained a working commercial hub even after Tabriz lost its status as capital in the sixteenth century. Tabriz itself, the capital of East Azerbaijan province and the sixth-largest city in Iran, was also the centre of the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1911.
Getting there
The bazaar lies in the centre of Tabriz. Tabriz International Airport (TBZ) is about 8 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Bazaar of Tabriz is a historic market in central Tabriz, Iran. It is one of the oldest bazaars in the Middle East and one of Iran's UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
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