Ardabil Bazaar

The bazaar of Ardabil runs through the old heart of the city, a network of covered brick lanes and domed crossings a short walk from the shrine of Sheikh Safi al-Din. Ardabil was the home of the Safavid order, the Sufi brotherhood whose leaders founded the Safavid dynasty in 1501, and in the Safavid period the city was a place of pilgrimage and patronage as well as a market on the roads that linked Iran with the Caucasus and the Caspian.

Parts of the present bazaar go back to that era, but like most Iranian bazaars it has been repaired and rebuilt many times, after earthquakes, fires and changing fortunes, and much of what visitors see dates from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its plan is the classic one: long rasteh, lanes lined with shops and roofed with brick vaults, opening onto timcheh and caravanserais, courtyards where wholesalers kept their goods, with small mosques and bathhouses tucked between them.

Light enters through openings at the top of each dome, falling in shafts onto the lane below. Shoppers come for the region's everyday goods and for its specialities: carpets and kilims from the city and the nomads of the surrounding plain, local honey from the slopes of Sabalan, dried herbs, and the cheeses, butter and halva for which Ardabil is known.

The bazaar remains a working market rather than a museum. Merchants who have kept the same shop for generations sit beside newer traders, and in the evenings, especially before Nowruz, the Persian New Year, the lanes fill with families. It is the best place to feel how the old city still works.