Tehran, Iran | C.2018
nside the world’s largest shopping mall sits a library named for an ancient Persian academy that reportedly once housed hundreds of thousands of volumes in Greek, Sanskrit, and Syriac. The 3rd-century Gondishapur was where Greek philosophers fled after Athens closed its Platonic Academy in 529 CE, where Indian astronomers met Nestorian scholars, and where one of the world’s earliest teaching hospitals trained physicians at the bedside. Iran Mall’s modern Jondishapour Library holds 45,000 books beneath wooden ceilings that echo those scholarly halls, a tribute tucked between luxury boutiques.
The original academy outlasted an empire. This one shares a floor with a shoe store. Both, in their own way, are still in the business of keeping people around longer than they meant to stay.
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Offering an array of gardens, royal buildings, and collections of Iranian crafts and European gifts, the Palace represents a spectrum of Iranian history and architecture that certified its place as a UNESCO World Heritage Site being one of Tehran’s oldest monuments.
Tehran's pre-Azadi icon: a gate to a garden that barely existed, where a bugler once announced dawn and dusk to the city.
From the CommunityThe Shah's palace, abandoned mid-breakfast in 1979, now opens its retractable stargazing ceiling to the public for a dollar.
From the CommunityThis floating castle appears to be from an enchanted fable, but in actuality it is Europe's best preserved Renaissance water castle.
AWA visted here
This state capitol building, constructed by three architects in different styles, still stands today thanks to an exterior staircase supporting the Eastern façade.
This fixture of British culture was nearly destroyed in World War II after five German bombs were dropped on the palace on Friday the 13th, 1940.
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