Ashraf

Ashraf lies on the southern Caspian plain, beneath the wooded foothills of the Alborz. Shah Abbas I founded the town in 1612–13 on the site of a small settlement called Kharkuran. Its royal gardens and palaces formed part of the shah's ambitious building programme in Mazandaran, a favoured retreat from the heat of the Iranian plateau. The court spent winter months at Ashraf or nearby Farahabad, and foreign envoys seeking an audience had to follow the shah to the Caspian coast. The palace grounds included several gardens and buildings enclosed by walls. Civil war damaged the city and its palaces in the early eighteenth century, but their remains continued to recall the splendour of the Safavid court.