Soleymaniyeh Palace

Soleymaniyeh Palace stands in what was once a large walled garden beside the Karaj River, where the road from Tehran to Qazvin crossed the water. It was built on the orders of Fath-Ali Shah Qajar in the first years of the nineteenth century, and is usually dated to about 1810–1812. Its architect is recorded as Hajji Mohammad Hossein Isfahani. In those years Karaj was a garden town and a resting place for the court on its journeys west, not the great city it has since become.

The name is explained in two ways. The more widely accepted account links it to the birth of one of the shah's many sons, Soleyman Mirza; other sources credit the prince himself with building the pavilion as a summer retreat. Either way, the palace belongs to the early Qajar moment when the new dynasty was busy building pleasure pavilions around its capital.

Its fame rests on its wall paintings. Around 1813–1814 the court painter Abdallah Khan, who had just finished the great mural of the royal court at the Negarestan in Tehran, painted large scenes here of Fath-Ali Shah enthroned among his sons, with the princes of the house and figures from the reign of the dynasty's founder, Agha Mohammad Khan. In 1856 the English writer Lady Sheil described a full-size fresco of the shah surrounded by his sons. Much has been lost, but fragments survive.

In the twentieth century the garden found a new purpose. A school of agriculture was established on the site, and under Reza Shah it became part of the University of Tehran's Faculty of Agriculture, which still occupies the grounds. Students of soil and crops now pass daily beneath a building once made for princes, in the middle of a city of more than a million people.