Alamut Castle

Alamut is a fortress perched on a narrow rock ridge in the Alborz mountains north-east of Qazvin, above a valley of rice fields and orchards. In 1090 it was taken by Hasan-i Sabbah, the leader of the Nizari Ismailis, a branch of Shia Islam, who made it the centre of a state of mountain castles that held out against the Seljuk sultans for more than a century and a half.

Hasan is said rarely to have left the castle after taking it, spending his years in study and writing. Alamut held a celebrated library, and the Nizaris maintained a network of fortresses across Iran and Syria. Medieval enemies spread the legend of the “assassins”, drugged killers trained in secret gardens, a story later popularised in Europe by Marco Polo; modern historians treat most of it as hostile myth.

In 1256 Alamut surrendered to the Mongol army of Hulagu Khan, and the historian Juvayni, who accompanied the Mongols, saved some books from the library before it was burned. Today the remains are fragmentary: walls, cisterns cut into the rock, and steps along the ridge, protected by modern scaffolding. The climb up from the village of Gazor Khan is steep, and the reward is the view across the deep valley that made the fortress so hard to take.