It was a fortunate time in which to build, for the seventeenth century was a great period in Persian art.
The architects, the tile and carpet makers, the potters, painters, calligraphers, and metalsmiths worked through Abbas's reign and those of his successors to enrich the city.
Travelers entering from the desert were confounded by what must have seemed an illusion: a great garden filled with nightingales and roses, cut by canals and terraced promenades, studded with water tanks of turquoise tile in which were reflected the glistening blue curves of a hundred domes.
At the heart of all of this was the square, which one such traveler declared to be "as spacious, as pleasant and aromatick a Market as any in the Universe".
In time Isfahan came to be known as "half the world", Isfahan nisf-i-jahan.

In the early eighteenth century this fantastic city, then the size of London, started to decline.
The Afghans invaded;
the Safavids fell from power;
the capital went elsewhere;
the desert encroached.
Isfahan became more of a legend than a place, and now it is for many people simply a name to which they attach their notions of old Persia and sometimes of the East.
They think of it as a kind of spooky museum in which they may half see and half imagine the old splendor.

Those who actually get there find that it isn't spooky at all but as brilliant as a tile in sunlight.
But even for them it remains a museum, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say a tomb, a tomb in which Persia lies well preserved but indeed dead.
Everyone is ready to grant the Persians their history, but almost no one is willing to acknowledge their present.
It seems that for Persia, and especially for this city, there are only two times: the glorious past and the corrupt, depressing, sterile present.
The one apparent connection between the two is a score of buildings which somehow or other have survived and which naturally enough are called "historical monuments".

However, just as all the buildings have not fallen and flowed back to their original mud, so the values which wanted them and saw that they were built have not all disappeared.
The values and talents which made the tile and the dome, the rug, the poem and the miniature, continue in certain social institutions which rise above the ordinary life of this city, as the great buildings rise above blank walls and dirty lanes.
Often, too, the social institutions are housed in these pavilions and palaces and bridges, for these great structures are not simply "historical monuments";
they are the places where Persians live.

The promenade, for example, continues to take place on the Chahar Bagh, a mile-long garden of plane and poplar trees that now serves as the city's principal street.
It takes place as well along the terraces and through the arcades of the Khaju bridge, and also in the gardens of the square.
On Fridays, the day when many Persians relax with poetry, talk, and a samovar, people do not, it is true, stream into Chehel Sotun -- a pavilion and garden built by Shah Abbas 2, in the seventeenth century -- but they do retire into hundreds of pavilions throughout the city and up the river valley, which are smaller, more humble copies of the former.
And of course religious life continues to center in the more famous mosques, and commercial life -- very much a social institution -- in the bazaar.
Those three other great activities of the Persians, the bath, the teahouse, and the zur khaneh (the latter a kind of club in which a leader and a group of men in an octagonal pit move through a rite of calisthenics, dance, chanted poetry, and music), do not take place in buildings to which entrance tickets are sold, but some of them occupy splendid examples of Persian domestic architecture: long, domed, chalk-white rooms with daises of turquoise tile, their end walls cut through to the orchards and the sky by open arches.

But more important, and the thing which the casual traveler and the blind sojourner often do not see, is that these places and activities are often the settings in which Persians exercise their extraordinary aesthetic sensibilities.
Water, air, fruit, poetry, music, the human form -- these things are important to Persians, and they experience them with an intense and discriminating awareness.

I should like, by the way, to make it clear that I am not using the word "Persians" carelessly.
I don't mean a few aesthetes who play about with sensations, like a young prince in a miniature dabbling his hand in a pool.
These things are important to almost all Persians and perhaps most important to the most ordinary.
The men crying love poems in an orchard on any summer's night are as often as not the lutihaw, mustachioed toughs who spend most of their lives in and out of the local prisons, brothels, and teahouses.
A few months ago it was a fairly typical landlord who in the dead of night lugged me up a mountainside to drink from a spring famous in the neighborhood for its clarity and flavor.
Not long ago an acquaintance, a slick-headed water rat of a lad up from the maw of the city, stood on the balcony puffing his first cigarette in weeks.
The air, he said, was just right;
a cigarette would taste particularly good.
I really didn't know what he meant.
It was a nice day, granted.
But he knew;
he sniffed the air and licked it on his lip and knew as a vintner knows a vintage.

The natural world then, plus poetry and some kinds of art, receives from the most ordinary of Persians a great deal of attention.
The line of an eyebrow, the color of the skin, a ghazal from Hafiz, the purity of spring water, the long afternoon among the boughs which crowd the upper story of a pavilion -- these things are noticed, judged, and valued.

Nowhere in Isfahan is this rich aesthetic life of the Persians shown so well as during the promenade at the Khaju bridge.
There has probably always been a bridge of some sort at the southeastern corner of the city.
For one thing, there is a natural belt of rock across the river bed;
for another, it was here that one of the old caravan routes came in.
It was to provide a safe and spacious crossing for these caravans, and also to make a pleasance for the city, that Shah Abbas 2, in about 1657 built, of sun-baked brick, tile, and stone, the present bridge.
It is a splendid structure.
From upstream it looks like a long arcaded box laid across the river;
from downstream, where the water level is much lower, it is a high, elaborately facaded pavilion.

The top story contains more than thirty alcoves separated from each other by spandrels of blue and yellow tile.
At either end and in the center there are bays which contain nine greater alcoves as frescoed and capacious as church apses.
Here, in the old days -- when they had come to see the moon or displays of fireworks -- sat the king and his court while priests, soldiers, and other members of the party lounged in the smaller alcoves between.

Below, twenty vaults tunnel through the understructure of the bridge.
These are traversed by another line of vaults, and thus rooms, arched on all four sides, are formed.
Down through the axis of the bridge there is a long diminishing vista like a visual echo of piers and arches, while the vaults fronting upstream and down frame the sunset and sunrise, the mountains and river pools.
Here, on the hottest day, it is cool beneath the stone and fresh from the water flowing in the sluices at the bottom of the vaults.

On the downstream, or "pavilion", side these vaults give out onto terraces twice as wide as the bridge itself.
From the terraces -- eighteen in all -- broad flights of steps descend into the water or onto still more terraces barely above the level of the river.
Out of water, brick, and tile they have made far more than just a bridge.

On spring and summer evenings people leave their shops and houses and walk up through the lanes of the city to the bridge.
It is a great spectacle.
The bridge itself rises up from the river, light-flared and enormous, like the outdoor set for an epic opera.
Crowds press along the terraces, down the steps, in and out of the arcades, massing against it as though it were a fortress under siege.
All kinds come to walk in the promenade: merchants from the bazaar bickering over a deal;
a Bakhtiari khan in a cap and hacking jacket;
dervishes who stand with the stillness of the blind, their eyes filmed with rheum and visions;
the old Kajar princes arriving in their ancient limousines;
students, civil servants, beggars, musicians, hawkers, and clowns.
Families go out to the edge of the terraces to sit on carpets around a samovar.
Below, people line the steps, as though on bleachers, to watch the sky and river.
Above, in the tiled prosceniums of the alcoves, boys sing the ghazals of Hafiz and Saadi, while at the very bottom, in the vaults, the toughs and blades of the city hoot and bang their drums, drink arak, play dice, and dance.

Here in an evening Persians enjoy many of the things which are important to them: poetry, water, the moon, a beautiful face.
To a stranger their delight in these things may seem paradoxical, for Persians chase the golden calf as much as any people.
Many of them, moreover, are beginning to complain about the scarcity of Western amusements and to ridicule the old life of the bazaar merchant, the mullah, and the peasant.
Nonetheless, they take time out -- much time -- from the game of grab and these new Western experiments to go to the gardens and riverbanks.
Above all, they will stop in the middle of anything, anywhere, to hear or quote some poetry.

Poetry in Persian life is far more than a common ground on which -- in a society deeply fissured by antagonisms -- all may stand.
It contains, in fact, their whole outlook on life.
And it is expressed, at least to their taste, in a perfect form.
Poetry for a Persian is nothing less than truth and beauty.
In most Western cultures today these twins have been sent away to the libraries and museums.
In Persia, where practically speaking there are no museums or libraries or, for that matter, hardly any books, the twins run free.

It is perhaps difficult to conceive, but imagine that tonight on London bridge the Teddy boys of the East End will gather to sing Marlowe, Herrick, Shakespeare, and perhaps some lyrics of their own.
That, at any rate, is what happens at the Khaju bridge.
Boys and men go along the riverbank or to the alcoves in the top arcade.
Here in these little rooms -- or stages arched open to the sky and river -- they choose a few lines out of the hundreds they may know and sing them according to one of the modes into which Persian music is divided.
Each mode is believed to have a specific attribute -- one inducing pleasure, another generosity, another love, and so on, to include all of the emotions.
The singer simply matches the poem to a mode;
for example, the mode of bravery to this anonymous folk poem: "They brought me news that Spring is in the plains And Ahmad's blood the crimson tulip stains;
Go, tell his aged mother that her son Fought with a thousand foes, and he was one".
Or the mode of love to this fragment by a recent poet: "Know ye, fair folk who dwell on earth Or shall hereafter come to birth, That here, with dust upon his eyes, Iraj, the sweet-tongued singer, lies.
In this true lover's tomb interred A world of love lies sepulchred."

These songs (practically all Persian music, for that matter) are limited to a range of two octaves.
Yet within this limitation there is an astonishing variety: design as intricate as that in the carpet or miniature, with the melodic line like the painted or woven line often flowing into an arabesque.