Takht-e Soleyman

Interesting facts

Adur Gushnasp is the only one of the three Great Fires of Sasanian Iran whose temple building has actually been found by archaeologists.

The site was identified as Adur Gushnasp thanks to a Sasanian clay seal impression naming the high priest of the house of the fire of Gushnasp.

The Byzantine emperor Heraclius sacked the fire temple in 623 or 624, but the priests saved the sacred fire and the sanctuary was soon rebuilt.

The sacred fire probably kept burning well into the Islamic era, until around the late 10th or early 11th century.

Shah Khosrow I reportedly visited the fire before a military campaign and gave the temple part of the tribute paid to Persia by the Byzantines.

The settlement already appears on the Peutinger Map, a Roman road map whose original is dated to the 4th century.

Under the Mongols the palace was known by a Turkic name, Sughurluq, meaning a place full of marmots.

The gypsum muqarnas plan, now in the National Museum of Iran, is a 42-centimetre grid of squares, rhombi and triangles set mostly at multiples of 45 degrees.

Palace tiles illustrate specific Shahnameh episodes, including the Sasanian king Bahram V hunting with the harpist Azada and Rustam slaying his son Sohrab.

The British travellers Theodore and Mabel Bent dug briefly at the site in May 1889 and took at least one tile fragment back to London.

Why it is worth it

Takht-e Soleyman, the "Throne of Solomon", is a walled royal sanctuary built around a small lake that wells up from the top of a hill in the uplands of north-western Iran. The hill itself was made by the water: a mineral-rich spring has spilled over its rim for ages, laying down limestone as it flows. Around this pool the Sasanian kings raised one of the most sacred fire temples of the Zoroastrian faith, and centuries later Mongol rulers built a summer palace on its ruins. The site was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003.

Excavations have found traces of occupation from the Achaemenid period in the 5th century BC and of Parthian settlement, but the great age of the site began under the Sasanians. Here stood Adur Gushnasp, one of the three Great Fires of the empire, dedicated to the warrior class; Sasanian rulers came to honour it before taking the throne. Coins of the Sasanian shahs and of the Byzantine emperor Theodosius II have been found among the ruins. The biblical name came after the Muslim conquest in the 7th century. Local legend tells that King Solomon imprisoned monsters in Zendan-e Soleyman, the "Prison of Solomon", a hollow cone-shaped hill about 3 km to the west with a pit some 80 metres deep, and that he created the pool in the fortress. That hill was formed by an older spring in the same way and later ran dry.

Around 1271 the Ilkhanid ruler Abaqa Khan, son of Hülegü, chose the site for a summer and hunting residence, and his son Arghun completed it. The palace followed the ancient layout: a courtyard with the lake at its centre, porticoes on all sides, four iwans facing the cardinal points and octagonal chambers used as throne rooms. Its walls were faced with lustre and lajvardina tiles bearing dragons and phoenixes taken from Chinese art alongside scenes from the Persian Book of Kings. A gypsum plate found here bears a geometric plan for a muqarnas vault and is among the earliest known architectural drawings of its kind in the Islamic world. Takht-e Soleyman is the only surviving secular complex of the Ilkhanid period.

Getting there

Takht-e Soleyman is in West Azerbaijan Province, about 25 km from the town of Takab and roughly 400 km west of Tehran. The closest airport is Zanjan Airport (JWN), about 100 km away in a straight line; Sanandaj Airport (SDG) is about 150 km away.

Takht-e Soleyman

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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