Azerbaijani-speaking bazaar city between volcanic ridges
Tabriz, capital of Iran's East Azerbaijan province, sits in the Quru valley between Sahand and Eynali volcanic ridges about 1350–1600 metres up and roughly 130 kilometres from the Armenian and Azerbaijani borders. Over 1.7 million residents in 2016 made it northwest Iran's largest metro.
The valley opens westward onto a plain that slopes gently to the shore of Lake Urmia, some 60 kilometres away. Most residents speak Iranian Azerbaijani at home and Persian as a second language, and the city ranks sixth in Iran by population. Heavy industry is its backbone, from cars and machine tools to refining, petrochemicals, textiles and cement, while its hand-woven rugs earned it the title World Carpet Weaving City from the World Crafts Council in October 2015. Tabrizi sweets, chocolate and nuts are prized across the country.
The name's origin is disputed. Encyclopaedia Britannica and others link it to tap-riz, flowing hot, after the local thermal springs. A 13th-century Armenian historian told of King Tiridates II renaming the town Tauris, from words for this revenge, after beating the Sassanid Ardashir I in AD 246, but no ancient source confirms that tale. Other scholars connect it with the 8th-century BC stronghold Tarui-Tarmakisa, and an Assyrian inscription of Sargon II from 714 BC records the name Tarui or Tauris. An Iron Age cemetery found in the late 1990s beside the Blue Mosque is the oldest physical trace. Egyptologist David Rohl even placed Eden nearby, an idea other scholars have not embraced.
Repeatedly wrecked by earthquakes and armies, the city's present layout may date to the early Sassanids or to the 7th century. After the Muslim conquest the Azd tribe from Yemen settled here, and when a quake devastated it in 791, Zubaidah, wife of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, rebuilt and embellished it so lavishly that she was sometimes called its founder.
Most surviving monuments are Ilkhanid, Safavid or Qajar, led by the Grand Bazaar, a World Heritage Site. As Iran's nearest major city to Europe, Tabriz pioneered much of the country's early modernisation and linked the Caucasus, eastern Anatolia and central Iran, even after the Qajars lost their Caucasian lands to Russia in two 19th-century wars.
Source: Tabriz
