Vakil Mosque

Step from the courtyard of the Vakil Mosque into its winter prayer hall and the eye is caught by a forest of stone: forty-eight monolithic columns, each carved with spiral fluting and topped by a capital of acanthus leaves, holding up the vaulted roof. Outside, the walls and iwans are covered in tiles painted with dense floral designs, a style closely associated with Shiraz.

The mosque was built between about 1751 and 1773 for Karim Khan Zand, the ruler who made Shiraz his capital and who took the modest title Vakil, "regent", rather than calling himself shah. It was one of a group of public buildings he endowed in the city, alongside the Vakil Bazaar, which it adjoins on the west, a bathhouse and his own citadel. The plan is unusual for a large Iranian mosque: it has two iwans, on the north and south sides of a courtyard of about 65 by 60 metres, instead of the classic four. The complex covers some 8,660 square metres. In the prayer hall stands a fourteen-step minbar cut from a single block of marble. Much of the floral tilework was added or renewed under the Qajars in the nineteenth century. The mosque was entered on Iran's national heritage list in 1932.

Shiraz, the capital of Fars province in southern Iran, is known as a city of poets and gardens: Hafez and Saadi are buried here, and its historic centre is still shaped by the monuments of the Zand period. The Vakil Mosque stands at the heart of that ensemble, a few steps from the bazaar's long vaulted arcades.

Getting there

The mosque is in central Shiraz, about 1.4 km from the city centre, on the western side of the Vakil Bazaar. Shiraz Shahid Dastghaib International Airport (SYZ) is about 9 km away.