Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 84

The promenade, for example, continues to take place on the Chahar Bagh, a mile-long garden of plane and poplar trees that now serves as the city's principal street.

It takes place as well along the terraces and through the arcades of the Khaju bridge, and also in the gardens of the square.

On Fridays, the day when many Persians relax with poetry, talk, and a samovar, people do not, it is true, stream into Chehel Sotun -- a pavilion and garden built by Shah Abbas 2, in the seventeenth century -- but they do retire into hundreds of pavilions throughout the city and up the river valley, which are smaller, more humble copies of the former.

And of course religious life continues to center in the more famous mosques, and commercial life -- very much a social institution -- in the bazaar.

Those three other great activities of the Persians, the bath, the teahouse, and the zur khaneh ( the latter a kind of club in which a leader and a group of men in an octagonal pit move through a rite of calisthenics, dance, chanted poetry, and music ), do not take place in buildings to which entrance tickets are sold, but some of them occupy splendid examples of Persian domestic architecture: long, domed, chalk-white rooms with daises of turquoise tile, their end walls cut through to the orchards and the sky by open arches.