Friday Mosque, Yazd. Note the butress on the right side of the photo

I have been putting off writing about mosques but I know that I have to bite the bullet. We saw a number of Jami (Friday) Mosques of varying shapes and sizes, not to mention ages and conditions … and I took an enormous number of photos which I can’t show or I’ll have to start paying big bucks to my Internet Provider for extra bandwidth. Better to borrow a book from the library because I am having a bit of a problem working out what is where, especially when we visited more than one mosque in a single day, as happened at least once.

Friday Mosque, Qazvin

The other problem I have is that I was not able to even look at my photos until I got home to my computer and some things had blurred a bit over the three weeks when I tried to match up the tour guide with the reality since we didn't always keep exactly to the schedule. There is one place where I have simply written "Ask Herself"; but Herself will not be back from overseas until March so I have to wing it alone.

Mosque under restoration, Shiraz

The mosques were beautiful and their tile work quite breath taking. The older ones are being faithfully restored with new tiles being made to replace those which are missing. The older ones almost all had scaffolding in place with people copying the remaining tiles to augment them with new, but not identical, replacements. The replacements are made in a slightly paler colour so that it is easy to see where the original ends and the restoration begins.

Blue Mosque, Tabriz. This mosque was in a dire state and is currently under restoration

We saw a couple with conical domes because birds roosting on the traditional domes are destroying them by dropping seeds into the cracks where they germinate and loosen the tiles. The birds can not roost on the conical shaped domes.

Friday Mosque, Nantanz, with a conical dome to discourage the birds

Some of the very old mosques have incredibly intricate plaster work and I have a lot of photos but have only reproduced one on this page.

Mosque under restoration, Esfahan, showing intricate plasterwork

I have not shown any close-ups of the tile work, some of which is magnificent. I’ll get around to devoting a page to it at some stage in the future; some of it, at any rate: but I photographed an awful lot of it

Friday Mosque, Shiraz

One of my guide books, talking about public toilets said “… if desperate, a mosque”. Probably the most beautiful sight, for me, in the whole of Iran was a room containing about thirty cubicles each containing a spotlessly clean squat, in a Jami mosque, when I was caught short with a tummy upset. My gratitude was immeasurable; I doubt if there is a church in the whole of Christendom which provides such a wonderful and abundant service in time of need.

Mosque, Esfahan, under restoration