Golestan Palace

Golestan Palace, the “palace of the rose garden”, is the oldest group of historic buildings in Tehran and the clearest picture of the Qajar court. It grew inside the walled citadel, the Arg, at the old centre of the city, a few minutes’ walk from the Grand Bazaar. When Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar made Tehran his capital in the 1780s, the citadel became the seat of the dynasty, and for more than a century each shah added halls, pavilions and terraces around its long garden of pools and plane trees.

The oldest surviving showpiece is the Takht-e Marmar, the Marble Throne terrace of Fath-Ali Shah, an open hall whose throne of yellow alabaster rests on carved figures. Most of what visitors see today belongs to the long reign of Naser al-Din Shah (1848–96), who had travelled in Europe and wanted a palace to match. His Shams ol-Emareh, the “Edifice of the Sun”, a tall double-towered pavilion finished in the 1860s, was built so that the shah could look out over his city.

The decoration mixes Persian and European taste with real confidence: rooms of ayeneh-kari, the art of cut-mirror mosaic that turns a ceiling into thousands of points of light; painted tiles of kings, hunts and the legends of the Shahnameh; and halls of European clocks, chandeliers and gifts from foreign courts. Under the Pahlavis parts of the complex were demolished as the city was rebuilt, but the palace kept a ceremonial role, and the coronation of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi took place here in 1967.

Today Golestan is a museum complex of several separate buildings, each with its own collection of painting, photographs, manuscripts and royal objects. It was inscribed by UNESCO in 2013, recognised as a meeting point of Persian craft traditions and nineteenth-century European influence.