نسخة مذيلة من "بلاد فارس والشأن الفارسي" بقلم جورج كرزون، مع أوراق مدرجة [و‎‎٤‎٩‎١] (١٨١٤/٩٩٢)

FROM TEHERAN TO ISFAHAN
25
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these, were encountered the slovenliness and the filth of the un
regenerate East. Such as it was, however—a strange but truly
Oriental mixture of splendour and squalor, of dignity and decay—
the city continued with little alteration till the first quarter of the
eighteenth century, when, the virtues of the reigning dynasty
having been sapped by an inherited course of debauchery and
intoxication, the capital and its monarch both fell a disgraceful
prey to the Afghans in 1722. The horrors of the siege—when
the Zendeh Hud was choked with corpses, when mothers devoured
their children in the extremity of famine, and when the inhuman
conqueror, after massacring all the princes and nobles on whom he
could lay hands, surrendered the city for fifteen days to an
indiscriminate carnage—have been powerfully described by the
Polish Jesuit Krusinski, who was himself a resident in the capital
at the time. 1 From this shock, and from the brutal savagery of
the Afghans, who overturned, and sacked, and defiled out of all
recognition, palaces, and avenues, and gardens, and whatever of
beauty or grandeur met the eye, Isfahan has never recovered. It
was patronised by Nadir Shah, but was less esteemed by him than
Meshed. Kerim Khan Zend shifted the seat of Government to
Shiraz. Agha Mohammed Khan Kajar shifted it again to Teheran,
when he dismantled the fortifications of Isfahan. Fath Ali Shah
sometimes visited the city, and ultimately died there in 1834. It
has only once, in 1851, been favoured by the presence of the reign
ing monarch. Under the depressing influence of all these circum
stances, Isfahan has fallen from its high estate, and now in
perpetual sackcloth and ashes—no inapt metaphor to apply to the
present appearance of the town—bewails an irrecoverable past.
The method which I shall adopt of describing the city will be
to give an indication of its general features, and then, step by step,
Plan of to visit its most renowned or interesting localities, de-
th e city picting at each stage the contrast between a past of
grandeur and a present of sorrowfulness and decay. The only
plan of Isfahan that I know appears among the plates of M. Goste s
splendid work, entitled 4 Monuments Modernes de la Perse.
Koughly speaking, Isfahan lies to the north of the Zendeh Hud,
Julfa to the south. In about the centre of the former is situated
the great block of buildings, gardens, and pavilions constituting
1 History of the Revolutions of Persia, taken from the Memoirs of Fathei
Krusinski, by Pere Ducerceau. Translated into English. 1729.