Deyhūk

Deyhuk lies in the arid interior of eastern Iran, on the edge of the great salt desert of the Dasht-e Kavir, in the country of Khorasan that was long known as Kuhistan, the mountain land. The surrounding landscape is one of desert basins, bare mountain ridges and widely spaced oases, where settlements depend on locally available water and on routes connecting isolated communities.

Water came from qanats, underground channels that carried mountain groundwater to the fields, so that villages with date palms, orchards, wheat and barley could survive in a landscape that receives little rain. Summers are fiercely hot, winters are cold, and the people also kept sheep and goats. Caravans passed along the tracks that linked the oases of Tabas, Yazd, Kerman and Birjand, bringing cloth, dried fruit and wool, and the small town served the farmers and herders scattered across the surrounding dry country as a gateway to the wider caravan network.