Naqsh-e Rustam, Fars · 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.

Most people who come to Naqsh-e Rustam come for the tombs, four vast crosses cut high into a cliff face a few miles from Persepolis, the burial places of Achaemenid kings including Darius the Great, so high up they seem meant for giants. What almost nobody lingers on is the smaller carving down at eye level beneath them, cut centuries later by a different dynasty. It shows the Persian king Shapur the First on horseback, calm and enormous, and in front of him a Roman emperor named Valerian, on foot, his wrist held in the king's grip like a man being led away. It records something that had never happened before and never happened again. In the year 260, at the battle of Edessa, Shapur captured a serving Roman emperor alive, the only time in all of Rome's long history that one of its emperors was taken prisoner by a foreign enemy. Rome carved its triumphs everywhere. Here, on a Persian cliff, is the other side of that story, the day the empire that trampled everyone was itself led away by the hand. Here is the part I love. Everyone tilts their head back to the giant tombs. The thing that stops the heart is lower down, quiet and human sized, where a king froze his single impossible victory into the rock and left it there for two thousand years.

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

No frame included.