Fin Garden, Kashan · Travel Poster

Each poster comes with a letter home. Ella writes about the place and its hidden history, and the details that never makes it into the guidebooks.

Everyone visits Fin Garden for the calm of it, the oldest surviving garden in Iran, laid out around 1590, all turquoise water channels running dead straight between cypress trees, fed by a spring that has never stopped flowing. What almost nobody is told, as they sit by the fountains, is that the loveliest room in the garden is also the scene of one of the most infamous murders in Persian history. The little bathhouse here is where Amir Kabir died. He was the great reforming chancellor of the young Naser al-Din Shah, the man who founded Iran's first modern college and tried to drag the country's finances into order, and he made enough enemies at court that the queen mother and her circle turned the young shah against him. He was stripped of his offices and exiled to this garden, and in January 1852 an assassin arrived with the shah's order. Amir Kabir is said to have asked to die in the bath, where his veins were opened and he bled out in the warm water. So the most peaceful corner of the most peaceful garden in Iran is also the place its most promising reformer was quietly killed. Here is the part I love, and it aches a little. You can sit by that water today in complete stillness, and unless someone tells you, you would never know the garden holds both the gentlest and the sharpest story in the same few square metres.

This poster is an original illustration in watercolour and ink, painted exclusively for the Ella's Adventures travel poster series.

No frame included.