The gentlest garden in Iran, and its sharpest story

Here is the Fin Garden detail I cannot stop thinking about, and it hides in the most peaceful spot in the place. You come for the calm, the oldest surviving garden in Iran, laid out around 1590, turquoise channels running dead straight between the cypress trees, all of it fed by a spring that has simply never stopped. Sitting by that water is about as still as travel gets.

But the little bathhouse in the corner is where Amir Kabir died. He was the great reforming chancellor of the young Naser al-Din Shah, the man who started Iran's first modern college and tried to sort out the country's finances, and he made enough enemies at court that the shah was turned against him. He was stripped of everything and exiled here, and in January 1852 an assassin came with the shah's order. He is said to have asked to die in the warm bath, where his veins were opened.

I painted the garden in watercolour and ink, the water and the deep green cypresses, and the whole time I kept thinking about how the gentlest corner in Iran holds its sharpest story, and how you could sit there in total peace and never know. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here:  Fin Garden, Kashan · Travel Poster