Shazdeh Garden
باغ شازدهA terraced Qajar garden in the desert at Mahan
Bagh-e Shazdeh, “the prince's garden”, lies just outside the small town of Mahan, south-east of Kerman, on a slope at the foot of bare mountains. Shazdeh is a colloquial form of shahzadeh, prince. It was built in the later Qajar period of the nineteenth century for a governor of Kerman, and it is one of the gardens listed together by UNESCO in 2011 as the Persian Garden.
The garden is a long walled rectangle laid on the slope. Water from the mountains enters at the top beside a two-storey residential pavilion, then descends the central axis in a sequence of terraced pools and small cascades, splashing over stepped stone weirs. Flanking the water run rows of tall trees, so that the axis becomes a green corridor framed by brown hills.
At the lower end stands an entrance gateway with a pavilion of its own, and visitors who enter there see the whole design at once: water climbing away from them up the slope to the main building. The contrast with the surrounding desert is the point. Mahan is also known for the shrine of the Sufi master Shah Nematollah Vali, and many travellers see both on the same day.
Shazdeh Garden through time
Iranian historyThe Pahlavi century and afterدوران پهلوی و پس از آن
Two Pahlavi shahs built railways, universities and a centralised state, while poets, novelists and film-makers created a new Persian culture. The era ended with the revolution of 1979.
- Inscribed by UNESCO as part of the Persian Garden
More in Kermanکرمان
Arg-e Bam
The great mud-brick citadel, under restoration since 2003
The Lut desert
Dunes and wind-carved ridges, the kaluts, on the edge of the Lut
Stories from the regionداستانها
Ahura Mazda and Ahriman
The Wise Lord and the Hostile Spirit: the oldest Iranian account of a world in which every person takes a side, and the moral heart of a faith still practised today.
Kayumars and the first kings
In Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, history begins on a mountainside with a king in a leopard skin, and the gifts of civilisation are won one by one: fire, iron, tamed animals, writing.
The garden carpet
Water channels, fish, cypresses and flowering trees: a garden carpet maps the Persian *chahar bagh* onto wool, seen from above and from the side at once.