A Metal Worker

The group was moving its way slowly down a side street close to Esfahan’s famous Imam Square when we heard a tap tap tap coming from a small shop on our left. We peered inside and saw a young man working on a strip of metal, incising it with a tiny, detailed, and quite beautiful design. He said he was practicing his skills.

It turns out that he is an apprentice to a master metalworker, Ali Saee, who was not in the shop at the time. The shop's name is, not surprisingly, Saee's Art Gallery. The image to the left was scanned from his business card. 

The young man showed us an incredible silver Koran cover which the master had just finished.
We thanked him for demonstrating his skill and slowly moved on down the street to our bus. I think he was grateful to get back to his work.

Miniaturists

In Tehran, midway on our flight from Tabriz to Mashhad, we visited The Reza Abbasi Museum (a miniaturist and calligrapher from the 17th century) which had a stunning collection of miniature paintings. They weren’t teeny tiny but the workmanship and the startling designs were simply gorgeous. Look at the antelope on the right bounding out of the frame of the picture with such a desire to escape the hunters.

So I was prepared, more or less, for the beautiful work of several miniaturists in Esfahan. In the first shop, Persian Art Gallery, Reza Toghi, one of two miniaturists working in the gallery, demonstrated his skill and speed by drawing a man and his donkey on a small square of black paper in white ink with a minimum of strokes but recognizable in every way. He gave it to a member of our group and she passed it along to me. I am so grateful. You can see it below.

We were then free to look around the showcases and admire both his work and that of his students. Painted on pieces of camel bone, they were incredibly small, each exquisite in its own way. Many of them showed polo games as they were played during the Safavid Dynasty (17th century) in Imam Square just outside his shop. Horses, men, action, a mosque, a palace, and the market. And painted with the tiniest brushes you can imagine. You'll learn more about the buildings depicted here in upcoming posts on architecture.

A Maker of Traditional Persian Musical Instruments

I’ve already mentioned this wonderful shop in Yazd in connection with Persian music. Moslem Mirzazadeh makes traditional Persian instruments, the tar and the settar, both of which he played for us. In the photo at the above, he’s playing the tar.

Traditional Shoe Makers

We saw two traditional shoe makers during our time in Iran. The fellow shown above has a shop and workroom in a balcony over the Public Laundry Museum in Zanjan. You can see sample of his shoes hanging from the ceiling behind him. He was much more interested in showing us a copy of the dissertation a woman had written about him than he was in showing us his shoes.

The second fellow had a shop in the market in Esfahan, close to Jameh Mosque. A pair of his shoes, made in the traditional manner with traditional materials, would cost about $50. I like the way the toes turn up at the ends. Why would they turn up, I wonder?

Makers of Tiles

Tiles are used to cover many surfaces in Iran, most notably mosques, shrines, palaces, and tombs. They are used to protect these buildings from the elements on the outside and hence have to be water-tight and durable and to beautify these buildings on the inside. So the role of the tile makers and tile workers is very important indeed. The exterior tile work on the dome of Imam Mosque in Esfahan, to the left,  is faience mosaic. Below is a shot of the interior tile work in Imam Mosque.






We learned about two major kinds of tile work:

Faience mosaic tile work. Large sheets of individually colored tiles are fired, each according to the specific temperature that the color needs to be most beautiful. Following the design on a paper pattern, these larger tiles are cut into smaller shapes and set into gypsum to form a mosaic pattern. This form of tile making came into prominence in the Ilkhanid Dynasty in the 13th and 14th centuries but continued into the 16th and 17th century as well. The photo above showing the intricate detail of faience mosaic is from the Blue Mosque in Tabriz which dates from 1465 but collapsed in an earthquake in 1773. It is in the process of being rebuilt. Notice the beautiful calligraphy woven into the third strip from the bottom.

Seven Color Tiles. These square tiles are positioned together, painted as a whole, often with very complicated designs, and then fired. They were developed and used a lot by the Safavid Dynasty in the 17th century as they were rebuilding Esfahan and continued to be in used through the Qajar Dynasty in the 19th century. These tiles are not as brilliant as the faience mosaic tiles because they are fired at a temperature which best suits the majority of the colors but not all of them. Over time, the colors fade. But they are much less expensive to produce.The example to the left comes from the Pink Mosque in Shiraz and dates from the 19th century.

In Yazd we had the chance to visit a tile store. One of the owners does tile repair work on many of the tiled structures around Iran. Repairing old tiles is one reason the tile craft has stayed alive and well in Iran. The small tiles and ceramic objects that we saw in the shop are made primarily for the tourist trade. They are wonderful, none the less.