Yazd

Yazd grew where a line of qanats — gently sloping tunnels that carry water underground from the mountains — made settlement possible on a plain between two deserts. Its position was its protection: far from the main invasion routes and surrounded by waterless country, the city was repeatedly spared. Marco Polo, who passed through in the 13th century, described a noble and prosperous town living by its silk weaving.

Its remoteness also made it a refuge. When the Mongols destroyed the cities of the north-east, scholars and craftsmen fled here, and the city flourished under the local Atabaks and then the Muzaffarids, who built the Friday Mosque in the 14th century. Later the Timurid governor Amir Chakhmaq and his wife endowed the square, mosque and bathhouse that still carry his name. Through all of it Yazd kept a Zoroastrian community through the centuries, sheltered by the same isolation, though its members long paid a special tax and lived under restrictions.

Textiles carried the city into the modern age: silk first, then cotton and the patterned termeh cloth, and from the 19th century mechanised mills that made Yazd one of Iran's main textile centres. The old city of mud brick survived the 20th century's rebuilding better than most, partly because it was poor and partly because it was difficult to drive through, and in 2017 the historic city was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Falling water tables, as the qanats run dry and deep wells replace them, are now the greatest threat to it.

Yazd's identity rests on two things: the desert and religion. Yazdis have a reputation across Iran for piety, thrift and hard work, and the city produced many of the country's merchant and industrial families. Conservatism here is lived rather than performed, and visitors notice both the strictness of dress and the warmth with which strangers are fed and housed.

It is the centre of Iranian Zoroastrianism. The fire temple on Ayatollah Kashani Street, the towers of silence on the hills, the cliff shrine at Chak Chak and the midwinter fire festival of Sadeh all belong to a community that has kept its calendar, its language of ritual and its own quarter here for well over a thousand years. Its numbers are small and falling as families move to Tehran or abroad, but its presence shapes how the city sees itself.

The Shia religious year is marked with unusual intensity. The nakhl, a vast wooden frame draped in black cloth and carried by dozens of men, is brought out at Muharram in Yazd and the surrounding towns, and the one on the square at Amir Chakhmaq stands there all year. The city also keeps the zurkhaneh, the traditional gymnasium where men exercise with heavy wooden clubs to drumming and sung verse, a practice recognised by UNESCO as intangible heritage. Handicrafts — termeh weaving, silk, tile and confectionery — are the other source of local pride.

About 530,000 people live in Yazd, and the province beyond it is thinly settled. The economy runs on textiles, tiles and ceramics, construction materials, mining in the surrounding hills, and the confectionery trade that sends Yazdi sweets to every Iranian city. Tourism mattered a great deal before the borders effectively closed, supporting the courtyard hotels, guides and craft shops of the historic quarter.

Most Yazdis live not in the old city but in the modern districts that have spread south and west along wide boulevards, in apartment blocks and detached houses with courtyards and air conditioning. The historic quarter has lost population steadily to those suburbs, and its houses have been bought up and converted into hotels, restaurants and workshops — welcome money, but a change that has hollowed out a residential district.

The day is shaped by heat for half the year: work starts early, the middle of the day is quiet, and the streets refill in the evening, when families gather on the square and on rooftops. Water is the permanent anxiety. The qanats that made the city possible are failing as groundwater is pumped out faster than it returns, and Yazd now draws much of its supply from a pipeline across the plateau. Like the rest of the country, the city has lived through years of sanctions, high inflation and, since February 2026, war.

Yazd is above all a city of sweets, and the confectioners' windows are a sight in themselves. Qottab are small deep-fried pastries filled with ground almonds, sugar and cardamom and buried in icing sugar. Cake yazdi are little cardamom and rosewater muffins. Baklava here is cut small and heavily scented with rosewater, and pashmak, a candyfloss of spun sugar, originated in Yazd in the Safavid period and is still made here. The sweets are bought by the boxful to be given away at home.

Savoury Yazdi cooking is desert cooking, thrifty and slow: thick pottages of pulses, grain and vegetables, and ash reshteh, the noodle and herb soup eaten across Iran, served with flatbread. Meat means lamb, grilled over charcoal as kebab or cooked down into abgusht, the lamb, chickpea and potato stew whose broth is soaked up with bread. Bread itself comes from the neighbourhood oven several times a day.

Drinks matter in the heat. Sharbat of rosewater, of sour cherry or of sweet basil seeds is served chilled, doogh is salted yoghurt thinned with water and mint, and black tea is drunk all day, often with a lump of saffron nabat stirred into the glass. Pomegranates and walnuts come down from the orchard villages in the hills south-west of the city in autumn, and the province's dates and pistachios are sold in the bazaars.