Golestan Palace, Tehran · 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 comes to Golestan Palace for the same thing, the dazzle of it, courtyards of mirrored halls and tilework so bright it hums in the sun, the old royal seat of the Qajar shahs in the middle of Tehran. What almost nobody stops to think about is the tall tower on the eastern side, the one called Shams ol Emareh, the Edifice of the Sun. Naser al-Din Shah had it built in the 1860s for a very particular reason. He had seen pictures of the tall buildings of Europe, cities that climbed upwards, and he wanted a high place of his own to stand and look out over his capital, which until then had almost nothing above a single storey. Find out more in teh heritage letter home.

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

No frame included.