Tāq Kasrā ( ar, طاق كسرى, translit=ṭāq kisrā), also transcribed as ''Taq-i Kisra'' or ''Taq-e Kesra'' ( fa, طاق کسری, romanized: ''tâğe kasrâ'') or Ayvān-e Kesrā ( fa, ایوان خسرو, translit=Eivâne Xosrow, links=, meaning

Iwan An iwan ( fa, ایوان , ar, إيوان , also spelled ivan) is a rectangular hall or space, usually vaulted, walled on three sides, with one end entirely open. The formal gateway to the iwan is called , a Persian term for a portal projecting ...

of Chosroes) are the remains of a

Sasanian The Sasanian () or Sassanid Empire, officially known as the Empire of Iranians (, ) and also referred to by historians as the Neo-Persian Empire, was the last Iranian empire before the early Muslim conquests of the 7th-8th centuries AD. Named ...

-era

Persian Persian may refer to: * People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language ** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples ** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...

monument, dated to c. the 3rd to 6th-century, which is sometimes called the Arch of Ctesiphon. It is located near the modern town of

Salman Pak fa, , settlement_type = city , image_skyline = File:001125-TaqKasra-Iraq-IMG 7914-2.jpg , caption = Salman Pak's famous Taq Kasra, the largest single-span vault of unreinforced brickwork in the world ...

Iraq Iraq,; ku, عێراق, translit=Êraq officially the Republic of Iraq, '; ku, کۆماری عێراق, translit=Komarî Êraq is a country in Western Asia. It is bordered by Turkey to Iraq–Turkey border, the north, Iran to Iran–Iraq ...

. It is the only visible remaining structure of the ancient city of

Ctesiphon Ctesiphon ( ; Middle Persian: 𐭲𐭩𐭮𐭯𐭥𐭭 ''tyspwn'' or ''tysfwn''; fa, تیسفون; grc-gre, Κτησιφῶν, ; syr, ܩܛܝܣܦܘܢThomas A. Carlson et al., “Ctesiphon — ܩܛܝܣܦܘܢ ” in The Syriac Gazetteer last modi ...

. The archway is considered a landmark in the history of architecture, and is the second largest single-span

vault Vault may refer to: * Jumping, the act of propelling oneself upwards Architecture * Vault (architecture), an arched form above an enclosed space * Bank vault, a reinforced room or compartment where valuables are stored * Burial vault (enclosure ...

of unreinforced

brickwork Brickwork is masonry produced by a bricklayer, using bricks and mortar. Typically, rows of bricks called '' courses'' are laid on top of one another to build up a structure such as a brick wall. Bricks may be differentiated from blocks by s ...

in the world after

Gavmishan Bridge Gavmishan Bridge is a historic bridge in Darreh Shahr County, Ilam Province, Iran. The bridge was built in the late Sasanian era on Karkheh River, parts of which constitute the modern-day border of Ilam and Lorestan provinces. It is in length ...

History

The exact time of construction is not known with certainty. Some historians believe the founder is

Shapur I Shapur I (also spelled Shabuhr I; pal, 𐭱𐭧𐭯𐭥𐭧𐭥𐭩, Šābuhr ) was the second Sasanian King of Kings of Iran. The dating of his reign is disputed, but it is generally agreed that he ruled from 240 to 270, with his father Ardas ...

who ruled

Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...

from 242 to 272 AD and some other believe that construction possibly began during the reign of Anushiruwan the Just (Khosrow I) after a campaign against the Byzantines in 540 AD. The arched

iwan An iwan ( fa, ایوان , ar, إيوان , also spelled ivan) is a rectangular hall or space, usually vaulted, walled on three sides, with one end entirely open. The formal gateway to the iwan is called , a Persian term for a portal projecting ...

hall, open on the facade side, was about 37 meters high 26 meters across and 50 meters long, the largest man-made, free standing vault constructed until modern times. The arch was part of the imperial palace complex. The

throne room A throne room or throne hall is the room, often rather a hall, in the official residence of the crown, either a palace or a fortified castle, where the throne of a senior figure (usually a monarch) is set up with elaborate pomp—usually raised, ...

—presumably under or behind the arch—was more than 30 m (110 ft) high and covered an area 24 m (80 ft) wide by 48 m (160 ft) long. The top of the arch is about 1 meter thick while the walls at the base are up to 7 meters thick. It is the largest vault ever constructed in the world. The

catenary arch A catenary arch is a type of architectural arch that follows an inverted catenary curve. The catenary curve has been employed in buildings since ancient times. It forms an underlying principle to the overall system of vaults and buttresses in ...

was built without

centring Centring, centre, centering"Centering 2, Centring 2" def. 1. Whitney, William Dwight, and Benjamin E. Smith. ''The Century dictionary and cyclopedia''. vol. 2. New York: Century Co., 1901. p. 885., or center is a type of formwork: the temporary str ...

. In order to make this possible a number of techniques were used. The bricks were laid about 18 degrees from the vertical which allowed them to be partially supported by the rear wall during construction. The quick drying cement used as mortar allowed the fresh bricks to be quickly supported by those that were previously laid. The Taq Kasra is now all that remains above ground of a city that was, for nine centuries—from the 2nd century BC to the 7th century AD—the main capital of the successor dynasties of the Persian empire:

Parthians Parthian may be: Historical * A demonym "of Parthia", a region of north-eastern of Greater Iran * Parthian Empire (247 BC – 224 AD) * Parthian language, a now-extinct Middle Iranian language * Parthian shot, an archery skill famously employed by ...

and

Sassanids The Sasanian () or Sassanid Empire, officially known as the Empire of Iranians (, ) and also referred to by historians as the Neo-Persian Empire, was the History of Iran, last Iranian empire before the early Muslim conquests of the 7th-8th cen ...

. The structure left today was the main

portico A portico is a porch leading to the entrance of a building, or extended as a colonnade, with a roof structure over a walkway, supported by columns or enclosed by walls. This idea was widely used in ancient Greece and has influenced many cult ...

of the audience hall of the Sassanids who maintained the same site chosen by the Parthians and for the same reason, namely proximity to the

Roman Empire The Roman Empire ( la, Imperium Romanum ; grc-gre, Βασιλεία τῶν Ῥωμαίων, Basileía tôn Rhōmaíōn) was the post-Republican period of ancient Rome. As a polity, it included large territorial holdings around the Mediterr ...

, whose expansionist aims could be better contained at the point of contact. The structure was captured by the Arabs during the conquest of Persia in AD 637. They then used it as a mosque for a while until the area was gradually abandoned. In the early 10th century, the

Abbasid caliph The Abbasid caliphs were the holders of the Islamic title of caliph who were members of the Abbasid dynasty, a branch of the Quraysh tribe descended from the uncle of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, Al-Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib. The family came t ...

al-Muktafi Abū Muḥammad ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad ( ar, أبو محمد علي بن أحمد; 877/78 – 13 August 908), better known by his regnal name al-Muktafī bi-llāh ( ar, المكتفي بالله, , Content with God Alone), was the Caliph of the Ab ...

dug up the ruins of the palace to reuse its bricks in the construction of the

Taj Palace The Taj Palace ( ar, قصر التاج, Qaṣr al-Tāj, Palace of the Crown) was one of the principal caliphal palaces in Baghdad during the middle and later Abbasid Caliphate. The palace was begun by the sixteenth Abbasid caliph, al-Mu'tadid (), ...

Baghdad Baghdad (; ar, بَغْدَاد , ) is the capital of Iraq and the second-largest city in the Arab world after Cairo. It is located on the Tigris near the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon and the Sassanid Persian capital of Ctesiphon ...

. The monument is also the subject of a poem by

Khaqani Afzal al-Dīn Badīl ibn ʿAlī ibn ʿOthmān, commonly known as Khāqānī ( fa, خاقانی, , – 1199), was a major Persian poet and prose-writer. He was born in Transcaucasia in the historical region known as Shirvan, where he served as ...

, who visited the ruins in the 12th century.

Modern era

In 1851, French artist

Eugène Flandin Jean-Baptiste Eugène Napoléon Flandin (15 August 1809 in Naples – 29 September 1889 in Tours), French orientalist, painter, archaeologist, and politician. Flandin's archeological drawings and some of his military paintings are valued m ...

visited and studied the structure with

Pascal Coste Xavier Pascal Coste (26 November 1787 – 8 February 1879) was a French architect. He was at one time a personal architect for Muhammad Ali Pasha. As a seasoned traveller, his travels to Qajar Iran, aroused the interest of King Louis Philippe I a ...

who remarked "the Romans had nothing similar or of the type". In 1888, a serious flood demolished the greater part of the edifice. In 1940,

Roald Dahl Roald Dahl (13 September 1916 – 23 November 1990) was a British novelist, short-story writer, poet, screenwriter, and wartime fighter ace of Norwegian descent. His books have sold more than 250 million copies worldwide. Dahl has be ...

, then undergoing pilot training at

RAF Habbaniya Royal Air Force Habbaniya, more commonly known as RAF Habbaniya ( ar, قاعدة الحبانية الجوية), (originally RAF Dhibban), was a Royal Air Force station at Habbaniyah, about west of Baghdad in modern-day Iraq, on the banks of the E ...

near

took an award-winning photograph using a Zeiss camera of the Arch of Ctesiphon in Iraq which was subsequently auctioned by the Dahl family to raise funds for the

Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre is a museum in the village of Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire, England. Children's and short story writer Roald Dahl lived in the village in Gipsy House for 36 years until his death in 1990. Overview Th ...

. The photo made £6,000. In his autobiography ''

Boy A boy is a young male human. The term is commonly used for a child or an adolescent. When a male human reaches adulthood, he is described as a man. Definition, etymology, and use According to the ''Merriam-Webster Dictionary'', a boy is "a ...

'' he writes: : You may not believe it, but when I was eighteen I used to win prizes and medals from the Royal Photographic Society in London, and from other places like the Photographic Society of Holland. I even got a lovely big bronze medal from the Egyptian Photographic Society in Cairo, and I still have the photograph that won it. It is a picture of one of the so-called Seven Wonders of the World, the Arch of Ctesiphon in Iraq. This is the largest unsupported arch on earth and I took the photograph while I was training out there for the RAF in 1940. I was flying over the desert solo in an old Hawker Hart biplane and I had my camera round my neck. When I spotted the huge arch standing alone in a sea of sand, I dropped one wing and hung in my straps and let go of the stick while I took aim and clicked the shutter. It came out fine. The monument was in the process of being rebuilt by

Saddam Hussein Saddam Hussein ( ; ar, صدام حسين, Ṣaddām Ḥusayn; 28 April 1937 – 30 December 2006) was an Iraqi politician who served as the fifth president of Iraq from 16 July 1979 until 9 April 2003. A leading member of the revolution ...

's government in the course of the 1980s, when the fallen northern wing was partially rebuilt. All works, however, stopped after the 1991

Persian Gulf War The Gulf War was a 1990–1991 armed campaign waged by a 35-country military coalition in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Spearheaded by the United States, the coalition's efforts against Iraq were carried out in two key phases: ...

. From 2004 to 2008 the Iraqi government cooperated with the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

's Diyala Project to restore the site at a cost of $100,000. The Ministry of Culture also invited a Czech company, Avers, to restore the site. This restoration was completed in 2017. On March 7, 2019, a partial collapse further damaged the Taq Kasra, just two years after its latest restoration was completed. In January 2021, Iranian Minister of Cultural Heritage

Ali Asghar Mounesan Ali Asghar Mounesan ( fa, علی‌اصغر مونسان) is an Iranian politician and former minister of Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism, was appointed on 13 August 2017 by President Hassan Rouhani. He was formerly head of ...

mentioned that a credit of about $600,000 would be required for the restoration of Taq Kasra.

Documentary film

In 2017,

Pejman Akbarzadeh Pejman Akbarzadeh ( fa, پژمان اكبرزاده, born 1980) is a Iranians in the Netherlands, Persian-Dutch pianist, journalist, music historian and documentary maker. Early life Born in Shiraz, Iran, Shiraz in 1980, Akbarzadeh had his first ...

, based in the Netherlands, made the first full-length documentary film about Taq Kasra: '' Taq Kasra: Wonder of Architecture''. The monument had been in danger of

ISIS Isis (; ''Ēse''; ; Meroitic: ''Wos'' 'a''or ''Wusa''; Phoenician: 𐤀𐤎, romanized: ʾs) was a major goddess in ancient Egyptian religion whose worship spread throughout the Greco-Roman world. Isis was first mentioned in the Old Kingd ...

attacks in 2015-2016; Akbarzadeh feared that it might be destroyed soon, and therefore felt urgency to film his documentary. The film explores the history and architecture of Taq Kasra with prolific scholars and archaeologists in various countries.

Gallery

File:Tagkasra.jpg, 1824 drawing by Captain Hart File:Ctesiphon-ruin 1864.jpg, 1864 photograph File:Stamp Iraq 1923 3a.jpg, 1923 Iraqi postage stamp, designed by

Marjorie Maynard Marjorie Josephine Maynard, Lady Garbett (23 January 1891 – 23 October 1975)Calendars of the Grants of Probate and Letters of Administration, via was a British artist and farmer, who designed some of the first set of postage stamps issued in ...

, featuring the arch File:طاق كسرى، العراق.jpg, 1950 photograph File:Arch of Ctesiphon assessment DVIDS221914.jpg, 2009: Iraqi officials and American military officers discuss plans to renovate the existing structures. File:Ctesiphon 01.jpg, 2016 photograph File:Národní muzeum Íránu.jpg, The

National Museum of Iran The National Museum of Iran ( fa, موزهٔ ملی ایران ) is located in Tehran, Iran. It is an institution formed of two complexes; the Museum of Ancient Iran and the Museum of Islamic Archaeology and Art of Iran, which were opened in 1937 ...

, the architecture of which is adopted from that of Taq-i Kasra File:001125-TaqKasra-Iraq-IMG 7945-2.jpg, Taq Kasra, Madain,

File:001125-TaqKasra-Iraq-IMG 7919-2.jpg, Taq Kasra, Madain,

File:001125-TaqKasra-Iraq-IMG 7940-2.jpg, Taq Kasra, Madain,

File:001125-TaqKasra-Iraq-IMG 7916-2.jpg, Taq Kasra, Madain,

File:001125-TaqKasra-Iraq-IMG 7914-2.jpg, Taq Kasra, Madain,

File:Ctesiphon, Iraq, 1932.jpg, Ctesiphon, 1932

References

External links