Iran - Andrew Burke [297]
0512 / pop 2300
Photogenic Kang is ‘Khorasan’s Masuleh’, a wonderfully homogenous stepped village of stacked mud-brick homes, most with porch-balconies and earthen roofs. Stairways duck beneath overhangs while steep slate-bottomed streamways run down the middle of alleyways. For the best overall view, fork left at the teahouse where the bus terminates, walk 400m, then cross the river and climb for about three minutes.
A very rewarding way to arrive in Kang is to walk (1½ hours) from the Shandiz–Zoshk road. The hike starts up Zoshk 14th Lane, to the left before Zoshk village, signed in yellow Farsi letters on green. This rough 4WD track crosses a bald, low-mountain pass that’s lonely but easy-to-follow. Buses from Mashhad’s Falakeh Ferdosi are fairly rare to Zoshk but relatively frequent to Shandiz or Abardeh (3km beyond); hitch hiking the last 13km to Zoshk is easy enough, passing a series of idyllic little stream-side teahouse-restaurants en route. Doing the trek with Vali Ansari Astaneh, you’ll also get to visit local family homes in Abardeh.
From Kang, five daily buses to Mashhad’s Kuhestan Park leave at 7am, 11.30am, 2pm, 4pm and 6.45pm. Alternatively, hitch hike via pretty castle-village Noqondar to Torqabeh (22km) from which bus 114 (35 minutes, two IR300 tickets) runs to Mashhad’s Falakeh Ferdosi every 20 minutes till 7pm. Torqabeh is famous for canework handicrafts, out-of-town riverside teahouse-restaurants and ice-cream sundaes served with nuts and lemon juice on a bed of noodles!
Tus (Ferdosi)
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Just as Stratford-upon-Avon in England is synonymous with Shakespeare, so Tus is inextricably linked with Persia’s 11th-century epic poet Abulqasim Ferdosi (Click here). Domestic tourists flock to the Ferdosi Mausoleum (admission IR3000; 8am-6.30pm), set in its own park and topped by a classically styled stone cenotaph. The current mausoleum only dates from 1964 but there’s been a tomb of sorts here since Ferdosi’s death in AD 1020. He was originally interred in his own garden because the local Muslim cemetery considered his writings too anti-Islamic for burial there. Similar extreme feelings resurfaced very briefly during the earliest throes of the 1979 revolution during which the mausoleum was damaged.
Beneath the main monument a series of reliefs represent Ferdosi’s works. A nicely presented but limited Tus Museum ( 266 3339; admission an additional IR2000; 8am-6pm), within the mausoleum’s gardens, displays gory paintings, exhibits ‘warlike equipment’ and sells postcards. In the rear section of the park, the Razan gate shows how incredibly thick Tus’s original mud-brick city walls once were. Tus had been Khorasan’s foremost city before being so comprehensively sacked by Tamerlane’s forces (1389) that it was effectively abandoned.
About 1km towards Mashhad, the Boq’e-ye Hordokieh’ (Gonbad-e Haruniyeh; admission IR2000; 8am-4pm) is a massive brick-domed 14th-century mausoleum that looks especially impressive when floodlit at dusk. There are several theories as to the structure’s purpose. The most popular (and least likely) is that it was a prison for the assassin of Imam Reza. The rather bare interior displays models of other tomb towers including the impressive Akhangan Tower (12km northeast of Tus) with its recently added blue-scalloped ‘roof’.
Tus village is now almost a suburb of Mashhad. City buses (two IR300 tickets, 40 minutes) and minibuses leave around three times hourly from Falakeh Ferdosi using two different routes. They terminate outside the mausoleum.
Radkan
About 75km northwest of Mashhad, the mysterious 25m-high Radkan Tower has baffled visitors for centuries. A tomb? A coronation spot? According to Iranian archaeo-astronomer Manoochehr Arian (www.jamejamshid.com), it was actually a highly sophisticated instrument for studying the stars built in AD 1261 by astronomers led by Nasruddin Tusi (Nasir Al-Tusi; 1201–74). The round, conical-topped brick tower was designed so that the sun shines directly through its doors and niches on solstice and equinox days. It was possibly with data collected