the wreck of the famous Blue Mosque When Robert Byron, on the 15th of October 1933, arrives in Tabriz, he records two monuments: the Blue Mosque and the Ark. In the case of the Blue Mosque no description is provided, at all. The author simply records in about 10 words that in Tabriz there was the…
Category: the road to oxiana project
The Tomb of Uljaytu or the Dome of Sultaniyya
One thinks of Brunelleschi The Tomb of Uljaytu is the first great monument Robert Byron saw in Persia as he would recall 6 months later his first visit, on the 12th of October 1933. On that occasion, Byron praise the monument as an example of Central Asian greatness and virility [sic!]. The ‘gigantic memorial’, in…
Robert Byron: a short life, a big personality
Robert Byron was born in an eccentric Victoria middle-class Wilshire family in 1905. Though the family was not rich, his parents managed to send him to Eton and Marton College in Oxford, where he obtained a third-class degree in History in 1926. Robert Byron’s personality was already well developed in his late boyhood or early…
The Friday Mosque of Varamin
‘From a distance, it resembles a ruined abbey’ The Friday Mosque of Varamin is the last monument Byron includes in his account under the 10th October 1933. Byron starts his brief description of the monument comparing it with the Tintern Abbey, in Wales. The only difference, according to Byron, the fact that the mosque ‘has…
Gunbad-i ‘Ala al-Din
‘This one […] was tenanted by an opium fiend who looked up from cooking his lunch to tell us that it was his home and 3000 years old.’ On the 10th of October 1933, Byron records in his travel journal three monuments: two tomb towers, and one mosque. The first tomb tower he mentions is…
Gunbad-i ‘Alaviyyan
“This at last wipes the taste of the Alhambra and the Taj Mahal out of one’s mouth, where Mohammedan art is concerned. I came to Persia to get rid of that taste.” The very first monument that Byron describes after arriving in Persia, is the Gunbad-i ‘Alaviyyan. The visit is recorded in his journal on…
The Monuments on the Road to Oxiana
Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana is certainly one of the best-known and most-read travelogues: ‘perhaps the best travel book of the 20th century’, it’s book no. 40 in the list of the 100 best nonfiction books of The Guardian. The book is a marvelous and addictive account of the 10-month-long journey of Robert Byron across the…
SquareKufic 