In one wild Zagros valley, a rebel lord named Ardashir built the founding documents of an empire that would rival Rome for four hundred years — and, doing it, fathered two ideas that outlived him by millennia. Below the gorge he raised a palace roofed with the first true domes Persia ever floated over square stone rooms; on the plain he drew a perfect circle two kilometres wide and stood at its centre. A shape that said I am the middle of the world, and a structure that let the world build the sky. Both were born here, together, at the start of everything.
"It was built so perfectly round that it seemed to have been laid out with a compass."
Ibn Balkhi, on the city of Gor · Fārs-nāma, c. 1110
In the 3rd century CE a provincial lord named Ardashir — Ardashir Babakan, grandson of a temple guardian — chose a plain in the folds of the Zagros, south of modern Shiraz, and from it built something out of all proportion to his beginnings: the Sasanian Empire, a Zoroastrian superpower that would face down Rome for four centuries. Firuzabad is where that empire was assembled, and you can still walk the pieces in sequence — the cliff-fortress he held before he had a throne, the rock where he carved the moment he won it, the palace he raised to rule from, and the city he drew to sit at the middle of the world.
Two of those pieces were not just monuments but inventions. Beside a spring below the gorge, Ardashir built a palace whose halls are roofed by domes resting on squinches — the little corner arch that lets a round dome settle onto a square room, and the earliest anywhere. From this valley the device runs forward through every Persian dome and into the vaults of Islam. And out on the plain he laid Ardashir-Khwarrah (اردشیر خوره, “the Glory of Ardashir”) — later Gor, today Firuzabad — a perfect circle two kilometres across, ringed by wall and moat, cut into twenty sectors by radiating streets, a tall tower at its heart. Every road ran inward to one point, and at that point stood the king. One invention let Persia build the sky; the other announced who stood beneath it.
The idea proved astonishingly durable. Later Sasanian towns copied the circular plan, and when the Abbasids founded Baghdad five centuries later, in 762, they too built it round, with four gates and a ruler at the centre — a direct descendant of the circle Ardashir drew here.
What survives today is quieter than that ambition: a ring of low earthen walls in the plain, the broken stump of the central tower, a great vaulted palace beside a spring, and a cliff-fortress above the gorge. But read together — and read from above — they are the founding documents of an empire, set down in earth, stone and rock by the man who began it.
Firuzabad lies south of Shiraz in a Zagros plain. The circular city of Gor sits beside the modern town; the palace, fortress and reliefs cluster a few kilometres north along the Tangab gorge. (The Tang-e Haygar canyon, a separate nature trip, lies in the mountains to the southeast.)
A circle is the hardest shape to lay out across two kilometres of uneven ground, and the easiest to read once it is there. Ardashir chose it for exactly that reason: it could not be accidental, and it could not be misunderstood.
Most ancient cities grew — sprawling outward along rivers and roads, shaped by the accidents of the land. Ardashir's city did not grow; it was declared. Founding a brand-new empire, he needed a capital that announced a brand-new order, and he found it in geometry: a single centre, twenty radiating sectors, a perfect ring holding it all in. Stand at the middle and every street runs to you; stand at the edge and everything leads inward. The plan is an argument about the universe — that there is one centre, and it is the king.
What makes it untamed is not the circle but the ground it was drawn on. This is wild Zagros country, all broken ridges and unruly valleys, the opposite of geometric. To impose a flawless ring on land like this was an act of sheer human will — the same instinct that runs through everything in this collection, the refusal to simply accept the shape the land offers. Ardashir did not negotiate with his plain, as Shushtar did with its river. He overruled it.
The city's name says what the shape was for. Ardashir-Khwarrah means "the khwarrah of Ardashir" — and khwarrah (later farr) is one of the deepest words in Iranian kingship: the divine glory, the radiant fortune that descends on a rightful king and abandons an unworthy one. Ardashir was a regional lord who had just killed the last Parthian emperor; the circle, the central tower, the palace and the reliefs were all one argument — that the glory had come to him, and that the world now had a centre.
Iran remembered him as a founder. The Middle Persian romance the Kār-Nāmag ī Ardašīr ī Pābagān — the "Book of the Deeds of Ardashir," written within a few centuries of his reign — tells of his flight from the Parthian court with the king's own maidservant, of a guiding ram that embodies the farr, and of his founding of Gor. Ferdowsi later folded the same story into the Shahnameh, where the Sasanian age opens with Ardashir. The man stamped his claim into this plain in earth and stone; the poets kept it alive in verse. Both were doing the same thing — insisting that an empire had a beginning, and that the beginning was here.
Firuzabad is not a single ruin but a scattered ensemble — a city, a palace, a fortress and a cliff carved with kings, strung along a few kilometres of plain and gorge. These are the pieces worth your time.
The great ring itself — walls, moat, twenty radiating sectors, and the ruined central tower (the Minar or Terbal), once perhaps thirty metres tall. Best understood from above, but legible on the ground once you know the plan.
The round city that shaped BaghdadThe valley's quiet masterpiece: three great domes, each about fourteen metres across and lit by an open eye of sky, floating over square stone rooms on the oldest squinches on earth. The stucco on the walls came straight from the grammar of Persepolis. Robert Byron stood here and decided that without this room, neither St Peter's nor the Taj Mahal could have happened.
Where the Persian dome was bornThe "Maiden's Castle," a dramatic fortified palace clinging to the cliffs above the Tangab gorge, built by Ardashir around 209 CE — before his victory — to command the only road into the plain.
His stronghold before the throneCarved on the gorge walls: Ardashir on horseback unseating Artabanus, the last Parthian king — the exact instant an empire changes hands — and, close by, the king receiving the ring of power from the god Ahura Mazda himself. The founding of a dynasty, argued in rock. The battle panel is among the largest reliefs to survive in all Iran.
The moment the empire changed handsEverything at Firuzabad tells one connected story: how a regional lord became the king of kings, and built the proof into the landscape.
Untamed Iran rates each destination on two dimensions — Adventure, the demands a place makes on your body, and Legacy, the weight it carries in history, ideas and wonder. Firuzabad is, in physical terms, an easy heritage day out — a circular ruin, a palace, a fortress and a cliff of reliefs, spread across a few gentle kilometres. Its real power is entirely in the second column: this is a founding moment of an empire, written in geometry onto wild ground, and that is what makes it worth the drive.
On the ground, Gor can disappoint at first. You walk among low walls and mounds and the broken stump of the central tower, and it reads as just another field of ruins. The thing that makes it extraordinary is invisible from where you stand — because it is two kilometres wide, and you are inside it.
Then you see it from above — a drone shot, an old survey map, the diagram on the site board — and it lands all at once: a vast, deliberate ring stamped into the wild plain, twenty spokes running clean to a single point at its heart. Eighteen hundred years ago, with no aircraft and no way to ever see the result from above, someone laid out a perfect circle two kilometres across by reasoning alone — and put himself at the centre of it. You are looking at an idea so confident it was built for a viewpoint its makers could never reach.
Stand on what is left of the central tower and turn slowly, and the plain looks like nothing — scrub, low mounds, a ring of eroded wall you could mistake for a natural rise. Then remember that everything you can see was aimed at the spot under your feet, and that the man who aimed it called the whole thing his glory, and meant it as the first act of an empire that would last four hundred years. The circle has almost worn back into the ground it was fighting. The idea it was built to make — one centre, one king, a new order — outlived the walls, the dynasty, and the city itself. And a few kilometres north, in the cool of the palace, the other thing he began still stands over your head: a dome on its ring of squinches, the shape that let Persia roof the world, holding up eighteen centuries later exactly as it was drawn. The empire is gone. Both of its ideas are still here — one you can only see from the sky, one you can only feel from beneath.
On a wild Zagros plain that had never known a straight line, a king reasoned out a perfect circle two kilometres wide and crowned its centre with himself — a shape so sure of itself that an empire, and later a Baghdad, were built in its image.
I was thinking about Golnar when I lit the Firuzabad cigarette — the beautiful enslaved woman who had been Ardavan's favorite in the court of the last Parthian king. From the roof of Ardavan's palace she once caught sight of Ardashir, fell in love with him, and then, boldly, went to his bedchamber and changed the whole of history.
Standing in front of the victory relief in the Tangab gorge, just outside Firuzabad, I understood why she did that. The carving tells you everything. Ardashir, at the greatest battle of his life, in the very instant he meets Ardavan — long curling hair gathered with two carefully tied bands, a beard combed and neatly bound, a necklace at his throat. It was clear enough — at least to me, in my cigarette time. This was a face that could steal the heart of the finest maiden in Ardavan's court, and, with her help, raise one of the greatest empires in history.
I tapped my ash off onto the mountain. I have always admired Golnar's daring — the way she rose against a life of enslavement and followed her own heart — even if it was not right at first glance. There is no image of her anywhere on that relief, the largest to survive in all of Iran's history.
And yet a large part of my mind has always been caught on one thing. That night, when she chose to open Ardavan's treasury, take its most precious jewels, and join Ardashir in one of the most dangerous escapes in history — what did she feel? Is love really as powerful as that?
The finest window. The Zagros plains turn green around the pale ruins, wildflowers come out, and temperatures are mild for walking the scattered sites. The clearest, kindest light on the circle and the cliffs.
The second-best season: comfortable, clear, and quieter than spring. The heat has broken, the light is low and warm on the brick and stone, and the whole circuit is easy on foot.
Hot on the Fars plain, with little shade among the ruins and the sun hard on the exposed cliffs. Visit early in the morning or late in the day, and carry plenty of water.
Cool and very quiet at the ruins, and perfectly walkable on clear days — often the most atmospheric time to have the great circle almost to yourself. Occasional cold snaps and rain.
⭕ For the circular city, the best "view" is not a season but an angle: look up the aerial image or the site plan before you go, so that when you walk the ruins on the ground you can read the ring you're standing inside. The shape is the whole point, and it hides at eye level.
A gentle, scattered heritage site that rewards a little preparation — know the story, read the shape, and bring water for the open ground. Detail folded away below; open only what you need.
The monuments and the canyon are spread across many kilometres of plain and gorge; a car makes the full circuit realistic in a day.
The site of Gor, the first Sasanian capital, founded by Ardashir I in the early 3rd century CE — a perfect circular city nearly two kilometres wide, with palace, fortress and reliefs. UNESCO-listed in 2018 (Sasanian Archaeological Landscape of Fars).
The plan was a declared idea, not a grown one — twenty sectors radiating from one centre, where the king stood. Encyclopaedia Iranica records a precise circle of about 1,950 m diameter. The geometry was the message.
When the Abbasids founded Baghdad in 762 CE they built it round, with a ruler at the centre — a plan widely seen as descended from the Sasanian round cities of Fars, of which this is the most famous.
The circular city of Gor, the Palace of Ardashir (early squinch domes), the cliff fortress Qaleh Dokhtar, and the Sasanian victory reliefs in the Tang-Ab gorge.
A great early-Sasanian palace by a spring just north of the city (c. 224 CE). Three of its halls carry domes about 14 m wide on squinches — the earliest known examples of the device that lets a round dome sit on a square room, ancestor of every later Persian and Islamic dome — and its stucco echoes Persepolis. The cliff fortress of Qaleh Dokhtar nearby is older still.
Spring is best, autumn the comfortable second. It's ~120 km south of Shiraz, reached by car, usually as a day trip; the sites are spread over many kilometres.
Firuzabad sits in the heartland of Fars, the cradle of Persian dynasties, and pairs naturally with the province's giants — Persepolis and Pasargadae to the north, the ceremonial capitals of the earlier Achaemenids, against which Ardashir's circular city reads as the Sasanian answer. The other Sasanian kings carved their own triumphs into the rock not far away, at Bishapur and Tang-e Chogan and on the cliffs of Naqsh-e Rostam. And within this collection, Firuzabad completes a quiet quartet about people and the land: where Shahr-e Sukhteh finally yielded to a failing river, the Shushtar waterworks struck a bargain with a wild one, and the underground qanat of Gonabad went looking for water in the dark, Ardashir did something different again — he simply overruled the ground and drew his own order onto it. Four answers to the same hard country, and here, the most audacious of them all.
If you want to balance the archaeology with a day in wild country, the canyon of Tang-e Haygar (تنگ هایقر) — a deep Zagros gorge on the Ghareh Aghaj River, sometimes billed as Iran's "Grand Canyon" — lies within reach of the same trip, and is best done with a local guide who knows the descent.
This article draws on the scholarly record for the early-Sasanian city and on heritage and field sources for the gorge, and is careful with claims about the circle's "firsts."
Facts last reviewed July 2026. Established: Ardashir I founded the circular capital of Ardashir-Khwarrah (Gor) at Firuzabad in the early 3rd century CE; Encyclopaedia Iranica gives a ~1,950 m perfect circle of twenty sectors, with a central spiral tower, and nearby the Palace of Ardashir, the fortress of Qaleh Dokhtar (c. 209 CE) and Sasanian reliefs; the Palace of Ardashir carries the earliest known squinch-supported domes (three domes ~14 m across, with oculi and Persepolis-style stucco); the ensemble is UNESCO-listed (2018). Contested / approximate: the round plan strongly influenced later cities including the Round City of Baghdad, but Gor is not safely called the “world's first” round city (earlier circular cities existed, and other Sasanian round cities like Darabgerd are comparable); whether the city was founded before or after the 224 battle is debated, with archaeology favouring “before”; the famous “compass” description comes from the medieval historian Ibn Balkhi; and while the palace's squinches are the earliest known, “earliest known” is not the same as provably the first ever built. Tang-e Haygar is treated here only as a nearby nature option, and its quoted length and depth vary by source.