Naqsh-e Jahan Square, Isfahan · 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 Naqsh-e Jahan Square for the same picture, that vast turquoise expanse framed by the great Shah Mosque at one end and the honey and blue dome of the Sheikh Lotfollah at the other, one of the largest squares on earth glowing in the late sun. What almost nobody stops to look at are four slim marble posts, two standing at the far northern end and two at the southern, so plain against all that tilework that most visitors walk straight past them. They are goalposts. Shah Abbas the Great laid this whole square out in the opening years of the 1600s not only as a showpiece for his new capital but as a polo ground, a place to play chogan, the royal Persian game, and he had those marble posts set at each end so the sport could run the full five hundred metres of it. He loved the game so much he would come down from the balcony of his palace on the west side and join the players himself. Four centuries on, the mosques and the bazaar are what fill the postcards, but those weathered marble posts are still exactly where he put them, quietly holding the title of the oldest polo goalposts anywhere in the world. 

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

No frame included.