The world's oldest goalposts, hiding in plain sight in Isfahan

Standing in plain site and almost everyone misses it. You come to Isfahan for the square itself, that enormous turquoise expanse with the Shah Mosque at one end and the soft honey dome of the Sheikh Lotfollah at the other, and it really is one of the loveliest places I have ever tried to paint. But at each end of it, plain and pale against all that dazzling tilework, stand a pair of marble posts.

They are goalposts. When Shah Abbas the Great laid this square out in the very early 1600s, he built it as a polo ground as much as a showpiece, a place to play chogan, the old royal Persian game, over the full five hundred metres of it. He had those marble posts set at each end, and by all accounts he loved the game enough to come down from his palace balcony and join in himself. Four centuries later the mosques and the bazaar get all the photographs, and those weathered posts are still exactly where he left them, quietly the oldest polo goalposts anywhere in the world.

I painted the square in watercolour and ink, the domes catching the last of the light, and the whole time I kept thinking about that huge, grand, sacred looking space being, first of all, somewhere to play a ball game on horseback. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here:  Naqsh-e Jahan Square, Isfahan · Travel Poster