The Vakil Bathhouse Café in Kerman

A bathhouse café? What on earth is that? Do they serve cappuccino with a croissant by the pool — or perhaps right in the pool?

Don’t get your hopes up. Just as in the Great Mosque–Cathedral of Córdoba the faithful of the two religions did not praise the Eternal One at the same time, so too in Kerman the Vakil complex fulfilled these two functions one after the other — each for long enough that it fully deserves to be called both a bathhouse and a café.

An AI-generated sketch of the Kerman bazaar. It contains quite a few inscription errors, which I’ll only be able to have corrected tomorrow around this time. The important thing is that the bazaar is essentially a long corridor: its ornate western entrance is shown in the west. The first section, marked in blue, was built in the time of Ganjali Khan (1596–1621), while the second section, marked in green, dates from around 1860, under Vakil-ol-Molk, the Royal Governor, Ishmail Khan Nuri.

The core of the Kerman bazaar probably took shape not long after Ardashir (224–242), the first shahanshah of the Sasanian dynasty, founded the city of Kerman — both as a garrison against eastern nomads and as a trading town on this stretch of the Silk Road linking India, Khorasan and Fars with the Gulf of Oman. This original nucleus — the meeting point of caravans and their unloading place — must have been somewhere near where today the bazaar’s ceremonial domed western entrance stands on Arg/Tohid Square.

Over the following centuries, the shops gradually expanded eastwards along the main street. This process was formalized by Governor Ganjali Khan (1596–1621), when the already existing bazaar section of the street was vaulted over with a series of small domes. This is how the first Kerman bazaar came into being.

As we know from the excellent Iranian urban studies of Mohammad Gharipour, the building fits neatly into broader Safavid trends — especially under Shah Abbas I (1588–1629), who sought to fill the state treasury by strongly promoting trade. Across Persian cities, merchant streets began to be vaulted in much the same way. The same happened in the capital, Isfahan, where around the bazaar street linking the new Shah Square with the old Great Mosque, a vast bazaar district gradually took shape, complete with caravanserais, bathhouses and mosques.

Following his ruler’s example, Ganjali Khan also branched a caravanserai and a bathhouse off the bazaar street. In keeping with Safavid public architecture, both are lavish structures radiating power and wealth. Their entrances open beneath tiled muqarnas vaults, like those of the most elegant mosques, effectively stamping buildings that served everyday public needs — yet in reality functioned as focal points of local society — with the seal of royal and gubernatorial authority.

The Safavid dynasty came to an end when the Afghans invaded Persia in 1722. What followed was thirty years of chaos, until Karim Khan of the Lur Zand tribe (1751–1779) ascended the throne. Karim Khan, perhaps Iran’s greatest ruler ever, brought peace to the country and embarked on major construction projects, especially in his tribal lands, choosing Shiraz and Kerman as his capitals. Out of modesty — he wasn’t of royal blood — he did not take the title shahanshah, calling himself merely vakil, governor. So his most important creations are called Vakil: the Vakil Mosque in Shiraz, the Vakil Bathhouse, and the Vakil Bazaar.

The Zand-era style is quite different from that of the Safavids. The grand, visually impressive and representative structures are replaced by functional, streamlined, smaller-scale ensembles designed for movement. In this style, about half a century after the Zand period, around 1860, the governor of Kerman, Vakil-ol-Molk Ismaʿil Khan Nuri, built the Vakil Bazaar extending the Ganjali Bazaar corridor and the Vakil Bathhouse.

The Vakil Bathhouse opens almost unnoticed through a low door from a side room of the bazaar. Through the door, we enter a spacious changing hall (sarbineh), which was used for changing, resting, and socializing. Tea was actually served here, foreshadowing the later café function. That is why it was lavishly decorated, in the Qajar era (1789–1925) style, with rich ornamentation and a splendid muqarnas vault, since visitors spent most of their time here. Its two side chambers are covered by smaller tiled brick vaults. From here, visitors could enter the bath (garmkhaneh, “hot house”), topped by a simpler, almost Art Deco-style undecorated dome.

The bathhouse was likely closed in the 1960s as private bathrooms became common across Iran — like many others, for example this abandoned one I previously showed exactly in Kerman. Converting it into a traditional café required few changes. The key addition was a few pictures that you might barely notice or dismiss: they look like a mediocre painter’s fairground works, old pieces hanging in the café almost unnoticed.

But that’s not the case. One — or more — of these pictures was essential in every traditional Persian café. And not mediocre, but naïve. A world of difference. Because that’s how it had to be.

Persian cafés, besides serving as hubs for community life, were also places for storytelling. Poets and singers would drop in regularly to captivate the whole café with animal fables, remarkable anecdotes, the harrowing martyrdoms of the holy imams, or sung chapters from the Shahnameh, just as Orhan Pamuk describes at the end of My Name is Red. A key tool for storytelling was the image — an illustration of an imam’s life or a chapter of the Shahnameh, covering every detail, which the storyteller could point to while performing.

Aside from the old Shirazi singer shown below, I only once heard this in Iran. I was riding the Tehran metro from the center to the northern Tajrish terminal, about an hour-long trip. During that time, an old blind singer recited the entire Shahnameh with astonishing skill. Just before the terminal, he went through the car asking for donations. Everyone gave him a very small value 100,000 rial green note, but I only had a 200,000 blue one, which I gave him. He felt it and returned a green one: “This much is what you owe for this.”

The narrative life story of Muslim ibn Aqil, cousin of Imam Hussein and his envoy in Kufa, created for storytelling purposes by café painter Muhammad Modabber, in the Tehran National Museum, c. 1950 (above), and an elderly storyteller with a stretched scroll depicting the Battle of Karbala (parda) at the Shiraz bazaar (below)

This composition of the Battle of Karbala, depicting every ritual detail, took shape and became canonical in the 19th century. Shown here is a version from around 1930 from the Brooklyn Museum; below, another storyteller stands beside a similar scroll on the wall of the Great Mosque of Zavareh, photographed by Samuel Peterson, also from the Brooklyn Museum.

A good café owner, wanting a full house, would give the storyteller a few dirhams, feed him, sometimes even put him up — and display one or more of these pictures to make the storytelling flow more easily. The images were explicitly naïve fairground-style works, which the audience felt belonged to them. The episodes depicted included Imam Hussein’s battle at Karbala or the most glorious chapters of the Shahnameh, like this one in the Vakil Café showing the hero Rustam paying homage to King Kay Kavus before defeating the White Demon tormenting the king and freeing him from inflicted blindness.

“The images were explicitly naïve fairground works…” Persian art, like everywhere else, trickled down from the elite to the lower classes. One exception exists: religious art and the coffeehouse art came up from below. The Persian people embraced the cult of Hussein and the other imams’ martyrdoms so fully that they developed an entire ritual toolkit around it — from the Ashura mourning ceremonies on the anniversary of the Karbala battle, through the deeply felt night-long story-singing (rowza-khani), to taziʿye plays re-enacting the battle and martyrdoms in fairground style — with naïve versions painted on mosque walls, café pardas, and illustrations. The elite ceded this space to folk artists, even using their works themselves on such occasions. Thus, this naïve folk art found a place in everyday Iranian life. In the West, still focused on high Persian art, it has received comparatively little attention. *

Most traditional cafés in Iran have disappeared, but where they remain, many of these images have survived, for example in the teahouse at the bazaar in the northern Tehran district of Tajrish.

The genre that emerged in the Qajar period saw a remarkable renaissance in the 20th century. The Pahlavi shahs, sidelining the clergy, sought to revive pre-Islamic Persian traditions, in which reciting the Shahnameh fit perfectly. British occupiers took advantage of this, distributing postcard series for storytellers that depicted Churchill and Stalin’s just struggle against the evil King Hitler in the style of Safavid Shahnameh illustrations. The narrators only had to slightly update their repertoire to present these stories convincingly to the café audience.

The last old parda painters passed away in the 1960s. But the tradition did not vanish with them. Trained young artists — Hossein Qollar-Aghasi, Mohammed Modaber, Marcos Grigorian — rediscovered the genre and founded a new naïve school called Saqqakhaneh painters. The saqqakhaneh was a public fountain house in the bazaars, whose walls were decorated with such naïve paintings. Etymologically, the name also contains saqi, the cupbearer, who in Sufi poetry is God pouring the intoxicating drink. This “from the pure source only” movement became hugely popular, so much so that even some revolutionary posters from 1979–80 grew from this tradition — as I will explain in a later post, along with separate posts dedicated to the Saqqakhaneh school and Iranian folk painting.

Rustam kills the White Demon. Saqqakhaneh school tile painting above the gate of Shirazi Vakil Palace