deputychairman:

The Jameh Mosque, Isfahan: if you ever saw that video of the guy singing in the beautiful blue mosque with incredible acoustics, that’s here, and it’s possibly the most incredible building I’ve ever seen. Truly huge and currently being restored, so the scaffolding seems to make the vast spaces quantifiable and somehow even bigger. For such a spectacular place it was almost empty, just us and the dust and a handful of Iranian families taking as many photos as we did. Our Iranian colleague showed us round like the best kind of not tour guide: he used to live in the city so half the tour was “oh they changed it, you used to be able to get through here! Or maybe I forgot…” and the other half was a mixture of his extremely erudite observations and knowledge, and running commentary on where he used to take his kids when they were little. (More people asked us about our families than about our jobs and I like what that says about a country. It’s also a place where it’s almost rude *not* to beam at other people’s cute kids, and i love that too.)

I became aware while there that I’d absorbed a negative idea about religion in Iran, and without questioning it had expected to be unwelcome in a mosque as three European non Muslim women, but that was my prejudice and not at all reality. Everyone there smiled at us whenever we exclaimed over something (we did that a lot) because even without a common language, the sound of people being delighted by something truly beautiful is universal.