Shah Abbas: His 1000km Walk Retraced
In 1601, Shah Abbas the First left Isfahan to walk more than one thousand kilometres to the holy city of Mashhad.
He and his party first travelled northwards to Kashan; then headed north-east across treacherous salt desert and salt mud; before turning eastwards along the Khurasan highroad, the route followed by so many pilgrims, and sometimes called the Iranian ‘Silk Road’.
Over four hundred years later, I retraced the Shah’s journey on two field trips to Iran – using the day-to-day records produced by Munajjim Yazdi as his small team walked with Abbas, measuring the distances between the stopping places using a rope measuring-device, the tanab.
This part of the website also presents some archive images of two royal buildings along the way, reportedly constructed for Abbas shortly after the 1601 walk.
