Jameh Mosque of Saveh

The Friday mosque of Saveh, the old caravan town on the road between Tehran and the west, is a building that grew in layers over a thousand years. Archaeologists have traced an early hypostyle mosque, a hall of many columns, from the first Islamic centuries, and each later dynasty left its mark on it.

The oldest part still standing proud is its minaret, a slender brick cylinder that tapers gently as it rises, standing apart from the main walls. An inscription dates it to the year 504 of the Islamic calendar, 1110–11 CE, in the time of the Seljuks, the Turkic dynasty under which so much of Iran’s great brick architecture was built. Its surface is worked in raised brick patterns and bands of Kufic script, a quiet showcase of what Seljuk builders could do with nothing but fired clay.

In the fourteenth century, under the Ilkhanids, the mosque gained new iwans and a carved stucco mihrab, the niche that shows the direction of Mecca. In the Safavid period the prayer hall on the south side was transformed into a square domed chamber under a double-shelled dome, its walls decorated with coloured plasterwork.

Today the mosque sits on the southern side of the modern city, its plain brick courtyard less visited than the great mosques of Isfahan or Yazd. That is part of its appeal: here one building quietly records the Seljuk, Mongol and Safavid chapters of Iranian architecture side by side.