In Isfahan
In Isfahan Chehel Sotoun Palace, Isfahan In Isfahan is the title of a short story by William Trevor and I turned to it after watching TV pictures of the war raging across Iran and tried to make some sense of the destruction that I was witnessing. Isfahan is a beautiful city. In the words of its governor Mehdi Jamalinejad: “Isfahan is not an ordinary city. It’s a museum without a roof…In none of the previous eras, not in the Afghan wars, not in the Moghul conflict, not even during the ‘sacred defence’ [the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war] was this ever done. “This is a declaration of war on a civilisation. An enemy that has no culture pays no heed to symbols of culture. A country that has no hist...