light houses

Paul sends the above image (among others); it's the mosque and minaret at Turfan on the Chinese silk road, built in the 1770s. It's this kind of thing I was thinking of when I posted this photograph.
I remember reading somewhere (was it in Robert Byron's Road to Oxiana? Byron was a great buff of Asian architecture) that the simplest, purest minarets were built by the Mongols who having invaded Persia settled there. The same ones I think who defeated the Assassins at Alamut and thereabouts.

comment