Until about twenty-odd years ago, before the Qazvin-Zanjan freeway was built to bypass Qazvin, the Karaj-Qazvin highway ended at a roundabout whose sign read Minudar Square. Every traveler coming from Tehran and Karaj toward Qazvin, whether their destination was Qazvin or not (for instance, heading to Rasht or Tabriz or elsewhere), had to circle this roundabout and enter the city entry boulevard. Minudar means Gate of Paradise and is apparently derived from an obscure hadith attributed to the Prophet of Islam, which called Qazvin a gate among the gates of paradise. This name and that sign are still in their places, and this square is still officially considered the Gate of Paradise. But the people of Qazvin know this roundabout as Stranger-Killer Circle. The reason for this appellation was apparently that for several years after its construction, the roundabout lacked nighttime illumination, and a stranger traveler who had been racing for hours on a deserted, uncontrolled highway would encounter an unexpected roundabout in the midnight darkness and probably fail to control the car, plunging straight into the depression at the center of the circle, and quite possibly being killed. If we take an optimistic view and assume all travelers to Qazvin to be righteous servants destined for paradise, then both the official and colloquial names of the square may signify one and the same meaning.
From its very inception to the present day, Qazvin has always been on the way: whether in ancient times and the Silk Road, or in the modern era and the routes connecting the capital to the northwestern provinces. On Iran arid, mountainous plateau, the settlement of cities and population centers has always been governed above all by access to water. On the other hand, the course and shape of roads, past and present, have been dictated by two factors: the origin and destination of the route, and the topographic conditions of the terrain. Neither factor has changed significantly over the past several millennia, and consequently the locations of cities and the general course of roads are roughly the same as they were in centuries past. The Alborz mountain range, on whose plain Qazvin sits at its foothills, runs in an east-west direction, and naturally the cities on its slopes and the connecting roads between them have taken shape accordingly. Much of the east-west traffic across the land of Iran passes through Qazvin, or if the destination is the Caspian Sea, one must climb from Qazvin toward the Koohin Pass and descend through the Manjil Gorge to Gilan and the shores of the Sea of Qazvin. But between the wayfarers of old and those of today there is a not insignificant difference: ancient travelers, given the nature of their animal-drawn conveyances, were compelled to stop and spend the night in Qazvin, whereas present-day passersby, with the bypass freeway, no longer even enter the city. It is no wonder that the quantity and quality of Qazvin hotels today are
Sardare Bozorg Cistern, Photo: Keyvan Salimi
inferior compared to the urban and extra-urban caravanserais of the past. The evidence is this very Sad al-Saltaneh complex, which is discussed in this very issue and was established in the Naseri era to service merchant caravans between Iran and Russia. One of the old travelers who recorded his observations in a travelogue and left them for posterity was Naser Khosrow: It had many orchards without walls or thorns or any barrier to entry, and I found Qazvin to be a fine city, with a strong fortified wall with merlons placed upon it, and fine bazaars. Of what the sage Naser Khosrow saw and described, not much remains: a large portion of its orchards have been sacrificed to urban development and suburban townships (though enough remain that the Qazvin municipality has established a deputy office to manage them); like many other places, it now has walls and thorns and every barrier to entry in abundance; it has no fortified wall, and without a wall there are naturally no merlons; but it does have fine bazaars: both the bazaar that offers traveler-friendly goods and its main bazaar that supplies the daily necessities of the city residents.
Qazvin is known mainly for its industry and agriculture: its fertile plain and thriving surrounding villages, and its three industrial satellite cities where a number of the country important industries are based. If someone, like your humble narrator, happens to be a gourmand with an adventurous palate, upon hearing the name Qazvin, before anything else they will be lost in dreams of qeymeh nesar and rose-petal baklava, and their stomach will begin to rumble. But to understand that Qazvin is truly far more than industrial townships, vineyards, and qeymeh nesar, it is worth looking at these numbers: Qazvin Province comprises roughly 1.1 percent of the country area and about 2.3 percent of its population, yet it shoulders approximately 8 percent of the country economic output and houses about 11 percent of all the country registered historical monuments. Apparently, in terms of the number of historical monuments, the city of Qazvin is second in Iran only to Isfahan. If you discuss this with the people of Qazvin (especially the part comparing them to Isfahan), they emphasize that this was the capital of the Safavid kings before Isfahan, and that Isfahan Dowlatkhane, Chehel Sotoun, and Ali Qapu are replicas of their original Qazvini models. Beyond all this, Qazvin has been designated by the Ministry of Culture as the capital of Iranian calligraphy. A title that may lack quantitative basis but is qualitatively not far-fetched, given the attribution of Mir Emad and Emad al-Kottab to Qazvin. Two calligraphers who not only wrote with a singular hand, but these two golden-penned Qazvinis also had fiery temperaments: Mir Emad, who quarreled with Shah Abbas so persistently and refused to acknowledge the Perfect Master that he ultimately laid down his life for this audacity; and Emad al-Kottab, who, by his own account, joined the Punishment Committee out of patriotism and integrity and inspired Ali Hatami in creating the character of Master Reza the Calligrapher in the story of Hezar Dastan. If we were to list the Qazvinis counted among the luminaries and pillars of national culture -- for instance, Obeyd Zakani and Hamdallah Mostofi and Ali Akbar Dehkhoda and Seyyed Ashraf and Mohammad Qazvini and Bahauddin Khorramshahi and Hadi Mirmiran and Aref Qazvini and many others -- we would naturally arrive at those statistics and figures mentioned earlier.