Belad Shapur

Belad Shapur is the old town of Dehdasht, in the west of Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province, where the ruins of a once-thriving city stand on the edge of the modern town. For centuries Dehdasht was the main town of the Kohgiluyeh region, a centre of government and trade at the meeting of the mountains and the lowland plains towards Khuzestan and the Persian Gulf.

The name links the place with Shapur, a name borne by several Sasanian kings, and local tradition holds that a settlement here goes back to the Sasanian era. The ruins that stand today, however, belong mostly to the last few centuries, from the Safavid period onwards, when the town flourished. They include the remains of a bazaar, a mosque, bathhouses, ab-anbars (domed water cisterns), caravanserais and houses, many of them built of stone and gypsum mortar.

The most striking survivors are domed tombs, some of them shrines of local saints, whose conical and ribbed domes stand out above the ruined streets. Walking among them gives a sense of a town laid out on a generous scale, with public buildings for water, worship and commerce.

The old town declined in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as trade routes shifted and the population moved, and much of it was abandoned. In recent decades Iranian archaeologists and the cultural heritage authorities have surveyed and restored parts of the site, and it has become a source of local pride, a reminder that this mountainous province once had a city that was a regional capital.