Getting lost in Yazd

There are cities that whisper their secrets. And then there’s Yazd. An ancient desert mirage that doesn’t whisper so much as lean in close, hot breath in your ear, and dare you to lose yourself.

Tucked away in the heart of Iran, the city rises like a sand-washed hallucination. A labyrinth of sunbaked alleys, windcatchers and walls the color of forgotten parchment. No postcard gloss here. Just centuries of ingenuity baked into mud-brick bones.

I arrived a few days ago by bus, and soon gave up any hope of following my worn map. Getting lost in Yazd isn’t a mistake. It’s the only way to meet the city. You don’t follow a map here, you follow the shadows. Turn a corner and you’re alone in a passageway older than most countries. Blink, and suddenly a child on a bicycle appears out of nowhere, zipping past like a phantom, a smile on his face and dust in his wake.

Roaming the alleys of Yazd.

I love getting lost in the labyrinth alleys, navigating on random while surrounded by staring old men, pointing their crooked fingers at the tall stranger. It feels like I’m walking around in Mos Eisley. The area is believed to have been inhabited for 7000 years, and some of the locals seems to have been around for a while as well.

I went up on the roof of a mosque to have a look at the sprawl of building. The roofscape of Yazd, in lack of a better name, is covered by badgirs. These are ingenious constructions acting as medieval air conditioning systems. I also notice that the minarets are quite tall, since they once functioned as landmarks for the ancient camel caravans on the old Silk Road. Marco Polo passed through the town in the 13th century and described it as “very fine and splendid”.

Badgirs on the rooftops of Yazd.

There was another historical place which caught my interest. It’s called Alexander’s Prison (Zendaan-e Eskandar), named after Alexander the Great who pillaged his way through Persia in 330 BC. Inside a beautiful domed building the site turned out to be a hole in the ground, supposedly built by Alexander as a dungeon according to a poem by Hafez.

But I soon find myself back in the deserted alleys, roaming freely through space and time. A baker gives me a piece of bread, straight from his oven. Zoroastrian whispers floating above rooftops, echoing from towers of silence on the edge of town.

Yazd is a reminder that the world is still big, still strange, and still full of places where time doesn’t move in straight lines. And sometimes, getting lost is exactly the point.