Tabriz

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Tabriz Summary

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Tabriz

(2002 pop. 1.2 million). Located in a valley amid the foothills of the Sahand Mountains in Iran, Tabriz, the capital of the province of East Azerbaijan, is a city just east of Lake Orumiyeh. Hot springs in and around the city were inducements for early settlement and subsequent development. Tabriz's location has made it vulnerable to earthquakes, however, and the city has experienced some of the most destructive quakes in recorded history as measured by fatalities: the 1727 quake caused 77,000 deaths, and the 1780 quake caused 100,000. Other major quakes occurred in 858, 1042, and 1641, and slight tremors are commonplace in the daily lives of Tabriz's residents.

Tabriz owes much of its development to its central position along overland trade routes in the region over the centuries. Many sources throughout history referred to the city's ideal position for travel between the Iranian Plateau and either the Caucasus or Anatolia. Therefore, even though most sources trace the origins of the city to the Sasanid dynasty (224/228–651 CE), it is often speculated that Tabriz is only the most recent settlement on roughly the same site, an earlier manifestation possibly being the ancient Armenian city Tauris of the third century CE.

The city's accessibility for trade, however, has also made Tabriz prone to conquest, and control of the city has shifted often throughout history. In the thirteenth century, the city avoided destruction during the Mongol-Turkic invasions of Southwest Asia by surrendering; it was designated as a political capital by the invaders and thereafter began to thrive economically even more than it had previously. Between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, Tabriz thus became an important seat of power and administration for groups like the Il Khan Mongols, the Kara Koyunlu and Ak Koyunlu Turks, and the Timurids. In 1500, Tabriz then passed to Persians under the emergent Safavid dynasty (1501–1722/1736) when it was conquered by Ismail I prior to his conquests of the rest of Persia (Iran). The city became and remained the Safavid capital until the seventeenth century, when the Ottoman Turks posed too great a risk to that location and the capital shifted to Esfahan. In 1827, Russia captured Tabriz for the first time. Although the Russians retreated when a peace was reached in 1828, this opened up Persia for increasing trade with Russia and Britain—much of it being conducted through the foreign missions thereafter established in Tabriz. Russian (and later Soviet) troops returned to Tabriz in the early twentieth century and were stationed there often, even through much of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and World War II. Although the Soviet Union attempted to establish a secessionist republic based out of Tabriz, the Soviets withdrew in 1946 because of international pressures, thus enabling Persia to reclaim the city.

Tabriz has long been a center of arts and handicrafts (especially ceramics, pottery, and tile work, Tabriz-style miniature paintings, and jewelry and silverwork), with exchange networks throughout the eastern Mediterranean and southwestern Asia. Indeed, Tabriz's Blue Mosque of 1465 is Iran's greatest example of glazed tile work, although it has been severely damaged over the years by earthquakes. However, the main handicraft and related trade of Tabriz has historically been carpet weaving. The great covered bazaar of Tabriz was built in the fifteenth century, and the city functioned as Persia's commercial capital into the twentieth century. As such, it was a nexus for globalizing trade relationsbetween the empire and commercial centers closer to the Black, Mediterranean, and Caspian Seas. Tabriz's economic connections with the West—and especially with Russia—were further enhanced by construction of a road from Tabriz to the Russian frontier outpost of Julfa in 1906. Persia's first railway was opened along the same route in 1916. With the Russian Revolution and later with the Soviet withdrawal from Tabriz, however, the city was essentially relegated to a peripheral city in Iran. But overland trade with Turkey did continue and, in addition to Tabriz's large population, prevented the city from being entirely marginalized. Nonetheless, the city—and its Azeri Turk majority—remained highly suspect to Iranian government officials because of its Soviet connection.

The ruins of the Blue Mosque in Tabriz, built in 1465 and later damaged by an earthquake. (ROGER WOOD/CORBIS)

As the urban center of an ethnolinguistic minority that makes up between 20 and 30 percent of the Iranian population, Tabriz is also a focal point for political issues that extend into the Caucasus and beyond. Such issues were well reflected amid discussions over the Republic of Azerbaijan's requests to open a consulate in Tabriz in the mid-1990s. Although ethnolinguistically distinct, Tabriz is like other Iranian cities in terms of its rapid population growth over the past decades.