Sa'd al-Saltaneh Caravanserai

Sa’d al-Saltaneh is a city within a city: a great complex of courtyards, vaulted passages and domed halls in the bazaar of Qazvin, built in the late Qajar period, in the reign of Naser al-Din Shah. It takes its name from Mohammad Bagher Khan Sa’d al-Saltaneh, the governor of Qazvin who ordered it, and it was completed, by most accounts, in the 1890s.

In the nineteenth century Qazvin stood on the main road between Tehran, the Caspian and the Russian and Ottoman lands, and its caravanserais were busy with merchants, goods and pack animals. Unlike the lonely roadside caravanserais of the desert, this was an urban caravanserai, or sara, built for trade inside the city. Its several courtyards were lined with two-storey rows of rooms for offices, storage and lodging, and they were connected by covered passages.

Its most celebrated space is the chaharsu, the domed crossing where passages meet, its vault decorated with intricate brick and tile patterns of the kind that made Qajar Qazvin famous for its craftsmen. The complex is often described as one of the largest and best-preserved urban caravanserais in Iran.

After decades of decline, the complex was restored and given new life with cafés, craft workshops, galleries and a traditional restaurant, while the courtyards remain open to the public. In 2023 it was inscribed as one of the fifty-four caravanserais that together form the UNESCO World Heritage site of the Persian Caravanserai.