firouzabad

Firouzabad is a city in Iran. It is located in Fars province, south of Shiraz. It is one of the most attractive and yet least known of Iranian tourist attractions. Alexander of Macedonia is known to have destroyed the city. Centuries later, Ardeshir I, the founder of the Sassanid dynasty, revived the city before it was ransacked in the Arab invasion of the seventh century. Firouzabad is situated in a low land compared to its surrounding areas. Thus Alexander of Macedon drowned the city by directing the flow of a river into the city, turning it into a lake that remained for a few centuries until Artaxerxes drained the water by building a tunnel, founding a new city in its place, making it his capital. The new city was named Kuh Ardeshir or Ardeshir Khoreh or Shahr e Gur after Artaxerxes, and had a circular plan so precise in measurement, that the Persian historian Ibn Balkhi wrote it to be "devised using a compass". It was surrounded (protected) by a trench 50 meters in width, and was 2 kilometers in diameter. The city had 4 gates, namely : Hormoz gate (north), Ardeshir gate (south), Mithra gate (east), and Bahram gate, (from the west). The royal capital compounds were constructed at the center of the circle, 450 m in radius. At the center point of the city was a fire temple, 30 m high, and spiral in design, which is thought to have been the architectural predecessor of the great Samarra mosque in Iraq.

  city was destroyed in the Arab invasion before it was revived again in the reign of Azdoddoleh of the Deylamid dynasty who overpowered the Arab caliphs and began developing areas left in ruin by the Arab fighters.

Since then the city has been called Firouzabad. Among the attractions in the city are the Ghal'eh Dokhtar, the Palace of Ardeshir, and the fire temple tower among the remains of the Gur city. The people of Firouzabad today are mostly from the Qashqai tribes of Fars. They used to live beside the Amudarya river before fleeing Genghiz Khan to Fars.

Firouzabad

See also