Caravanserais: The Strongholds of the Soul

دل ای سلیم بر این کاروانسرا مبند / که خانه ساختن آیین کاروانی نیست

“Oh innocent heart, in this caravanserai do not lay your trust, for making a home is not the habit of wanderers.” (Sa'adi)

Caravanserai is a Persian term for a closed compound used to accommodate travellers, usually merchants and pilgrims, providing them and their animals a much-needed shelter from a hostile environment. These institutions, once common across the pre-modern Islamic world — from Anatolia to the Arabian desert, from North Africa to the borders of China — played a crucial role in vast commercial and religious networks that carried people, materials and ideas across the Eurasian continent.

Caravanserai networks, known in the Middle East also by the Turkish name han, were built of stone, mud brick or fired brick: square or rectangular structures, usually of no more than two floors, surrounding an open or roofed central courtyard.

They were built along the major routes, usually no more than thirty kilometres apart, and ensured the safe travel of traders and pilgrims — but they also served as symbols of authority and as tax stations. In some cases construction and maintenance were financed by local benefactors, but in most cases by the ruling authority itself. Accordingly, many of these inns, in Iran, Anatolia and elsewhere, were richly designed and ornamented, with elaborate iwan portals, colourful glazed brick and dynastic dedicatory inscriptions, as befitted a royal institution.

Out of the ribat

The architectural origin of the caravanserai, and its rise as an institution, lies in the formative years of the Arab empire. The Islamic conquest of the vast territories of North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia created buffer zones between the cultural centres of the newly conquered lands — Greater Syria, Mesopotamia, Iran — and the lands beyond. These outer zones, such as the Maghreb and Transoxiana (Arabic: ma wara' al-nahr), were an attractive destination for Islamic fighters known as ghazi, who found there a fertile source of holy war against the unbelievers as well as a rich source of loot.

At the end of a hard day's fighting and pillaging, these rough men of war found a safe haven in modest citadels, strategically built to let them observe and control their surroundings, but also used as places of study and spiritual contemplation.

These archaic bastions, scattered along the borders of the Dar al-Islam, were known as ribats, and they eventually gave their name to the Murabitun (dwellers of ribats) dynasty that ruled North Africa and al-Andalus until the twelfth century, as well as to the capital of modern Morocco, Rabat. These names are a distant echo of the expanding Islamic frontier, pressed towards the horizon by the sword, but also by the pen, the written word and the scales.

In time the ribat forts housed not only fierce holy warriors but also wandering Sufi dervishes and Muslim merchants. Both groups found in the vast borderland far beyond the urban centres a desirable destination for lucrative commercial and religious activity.

These enterprises contributed in their own right to the spread of Islam, especially among the nomadic Turkic groups that roamed the sea of grass across northern Eurasia.

The ribats, with their commercial and religious functions, eventually became the model for the later caravanserai networks, although earlier influences — Sasanian fortifications and postal stations, and the Roman castrum forts — also lent their architectural weight to the design.

Karakhanid to Safavid

The first caravanserais built in the form we recognise today were probably constructed under the Karakhanids (840–1212) and the Ghaznavids (977–1186), two Turkic dynasties that ruled the borderlands of Transoxiana and Afghanistan. From these realms the style developed further under the mighty Turkic empire of the Great Seljuks (1037–1194), which propagated it far and wide in Iran, Anatolia and across the Middle East.

The heyday of the caravanserai networks, at least in the eastern, Persianate part of Islamic civilisation, lasted through the Seljuk era; after the destruction of the Mongol invasions came a period of considerable revival and expansion of the system under the Safavids of Iran, and to some extent under the Ottoman Turks.

With the onset of European commercial domination, especially through the maritime route to China, central Eurasia fell into economic crisis caused by the dwindling flow of goods along its ancient routes. As a consequence, the once-bustling shelters for voyagers and wanderers fell into disuse. With no revenue for much-needed maintenance they fell into ruin, their elegant arches crumbling, and only owls finding a resting place within their desolate walls.

Today some caravanserais have been partly restored as archaeological and tourist sites, with fine examples in Turkish Anatolia, Armenia, Iran, Uzbekistan and as far as the Kyrgyz-Chinese border. A few have even been restored and brought back to life as boutique hotels; though such renovations usually look rather extravagant against the caravanserai's rustic image, they can still be regarded as homage to a once-central institution.

An inn with two gates

In literature the road inn was held — when not portrayed as a flea-infested, dubious place — to be a refuge, a source of warmth and comfort in an inhospitable land, and figuratively, the soul's search for salvation. That theme may itself be a distant echo of the ribat fort and its bands of rag-wearing Sufis, seeking the presence of the divine far beyond the borders of the known world.

The famous blind aşık (minstrel) Veysel (1894–1973), born in Anatolia at the end of the nineteenth century, compared life to a han — the Turkish word for caravanserai — with two doors. Perhaps he borrowed the deterministic image from his own grim experience, which included being blinded by smallpox, the death of his parents while he was young, and his departure for a life of destitute wandering with his bağlama; and perhaps he meant that life has only two certainties, the two doors: birth and death.

Uzun ince bir yoldayım / Gidiyorum gündüz gece — “I am on a long and narrow road, walking all day and all night; unaware of the condition I am in, walking day and night. From the moment I was born I started walking right away, in an inn with two gates, walking day and night. Walking even in my sleep, seeking a reason for staying, eyeing those who are leaving, walking day and night. Forty-nine years on these roads, on the plains, mountains and deserts, stuck in these foreign lands, walking day and night. Veysel is bewildered by this situation; it makes him cry some, smile some; trying to reach a destination, walking day and night.”