The desert city that made ice with no fridge

You visit Yazd for the skyline, all those tall slotted towers rising from the rooftops of a mud brick city on the edge of the desert, and they really are beautiful against the light. They are windcatchers, badgirs, and I always assumed they were just handsome chimneys.

They are not. They are the visible top of an invisible machine. In one of the hottest, driest places anyone has ever chosen to live, the people of Yazd worked out how to make and keep ice right through summer using only air, earth and water, and no fuel at all. They built huge domed mud ice pits called yakhchals, ran water into shallow channels to freeze under the cold night sky, then packed the ice down into deep chambers dug into the cool ground. The windcatchers did the clever part, grabbing the faintest breeze and funnelling it down to keep the store cold while the hot air slipped up and out through the top.

I painted the town in watercolour and ink, the towers catching the last warm light, and the whole time I kept thinking about a city with no electricity keeping its ice frozen through forty degree days, centuries before the fridge. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here:  Yazd, Iran · Travel Poster