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At ten I met Hamid and Masud in the lobby for our trip to the Church St. Stephanos. Although of course mainly concerned with the history of the Ilkhanate in Iran, I am also interested in monuments which pre-date the Mongol occupation and have managed to survive down to the present day. There are wildly differing opinions about how old St. Stephanos Church is, but it is possible that at least some parts of it were built before the Ilkhanate period.  An inch of fresh snow has fallen overnight, but the roads are bare by the time we start out. Just beyond our hotel we pass by a large parking lot where an Ashura ceremony is taking place. In front of a flat-bed truck with loudspeakers a group of actors in notionally seventh century costumes play out the deaths of Muhammad’s grandson Husain and his family and supporters at the hands of the Umayyad s. The Umayyad villains are dressed in red. In a ring around the actors are several hundred spectators, almost all the women dressed in black c...

The morning after my trip to the Church of St. Stephanos the breakfast hall of my hotel in Tabriz is occupied by two tour groups from Germany, each with maybe fifteen people. These are not adventure tourism types. All appear to be in their seventies or older, retirees checking Iran off their  list while they are still able to ambulate without walkers or motorized carts. They dutifully line up for cold cereal and bowls of prunes. All the women are wearing head scarves. I tuck into comb honey, clotted cream, dates, and flat bread while reviewing the day’s itinerary. Today will be devoted to Tabriz itself. As mentioned, Tabriz was the Il-Khanate capital from 1265 to around 1305, when Ölziit Khan moved the government to  Sultaniyya . Even after the capital was transferred to Sulṭaniyya Tabriz remained probably the most prominent city in the Il-Khanate. Unfortunately, there are few if any physical remains of the Il-Khanate period left in Tabriz. Devastating earthquakes that perio...