The Shah-Abbasi caravansarai in Karaj, Iran

A caravanserai (or caravansary; /kærəˈvænsəˌraɪ/)^[1] was a roadside inn where travelers (caravaners) could rest and recover from the day's journey.^[2] Caravanserais supported the flow of commerce, information and people across the network of trade routes covering Asia, North Africa and Southeast Europe, most notably the Silk Road.^[3][4] Often located along rural roads in the countryside, urban versions of caravanserais were also historically common in cities throughout the Islamic world, and were often called other names such as khan, wikala, or funduq.^[5]

The Izadkhast caravanserai (early 17th century), Fars Province, Iran

Terms and etymology

The Ganjali Khan Caravanserai (1598), in Kerman, Iran

Caravanserai

کاروانسرای kārvānsarāy is the Persian compound word variant combining kārvān "caravan" with sarāy "palace", "building with enclosed courts".^[6] Here "caravan" means a group of traders, pilgrims or other travellers, engaged in long-distance travel. The word is also rendered as caravansary, caravansaray, caravanseray, caravansara, and caravansarai.^[4] In scholarly sources, it is often used as an umbrella term for multiple related types of commercial buildings similar to inns or hostels, whereas the actual instances of such buildings had a variety of names depending on the region and the local language.^[5] However, the term was typically preferred for rural inns built along roads outside of city walls.^[7]

Khan As'ad Pasha (1751-52) in Damascus, Syria

Khan

The word khan (خان) derives from Middle Persian hʾn' (xān, "house").^[8][5] It could refer to an "urban caravanserai" built within a town or a city,^[5][9] or generally to any caravanserai, including those built in the countryside and along desert routes.^[10] In Turkish the word is rendered as han.^[5] The same word was used in Bosnian and Bulgarian, having arrived through Ottoman conquest. In addition to Turkish and Persian, the term was widely used in Arabic as well, and examples of such buildings are found throughout the Middle East from as early as the Ummayyad period.^[5][9] The term han is also used in Romanian being adopted from Ottoman Turkish.

Funduq

Funduq al-Najjarin in Fes, Morocco

The term funduq (Arabic: فندق; sometimes spelled foundouk or fondouk from the French transliteration) is frequently used for historic inns in Morocco and around western North Africa.^{[5][11][12]: 116} The word comes from Greek pandocheion, lit.: "welcoming all",^[13][5] thus meaning 'inn', led to funduq in Arabic (فندق), pundak in Hebrew (פונדק‎), fundaco in Venice, fondaco in Genoa and alhóndiga^[14] or fonda in Spanish (funduq is the origin of Spanish term fonda). In the cities of this region such buildings were also frequently used as housing for artisan workshops.^{[15][11][16]: 318}

Wikala

The Arabic word wikala (وكالة), sometimes spelled wakala or wekala, is a term found frequently in historic Cairo for an urban caravanserai which housed merchants and their goods and served as a center for trade, storage, transactions and other commercial activity.^[17] The word wikala means roughly "agency" in Arabic, in this case a commercial agency,^[17] which may also have been a reference to the customs offices that could be located here to deal with imported goods.^[18] The term khan was also frequently used for this type of building in Egypt.^[5]

History

The entrance portal of the Sultan Han (13th century) near Aksaray, Turkey

Caravanserais were a common feature not only along the Silk Road, but also along the Achaemenid Empire's Royal Road, a 2,500-kilometre-long (1,600 mi) ancient highway that stretched from Sardis to Susa according to Herodotus: "Now the true account of the road in question is the following: Royal stations exist along its whole length, and excellent caravanserais; and throughout, it traverses an inhabited tract, and is free from danger."^[19] Other significant urban caravanserais were built along the Grand Trunk Road in the Indian subcontinent, especially in the region of Mughal Delhi and Bengal Subah.

Throughout most of the Islamic period (7th century and after), caravanserais were a common type of structure both in the rural countryside and in dense urban centers across the Middle East, North Africa, and Ottoman Europe.^[5] A number of 12th to 13th-century caravanserais or hans were built throughout the Seljuk Empire, many examples of which have survived across Turkey today^[20][21] (e.g. the large Sultan Han in Aksaray Province) as well as in Iran (e.g. the Ribat-i Sharaf in Khorasan). Urban versions of caravanserais also became important centers of economic activity in cities across these different regions of the Muslim world, often concentrated near the main souq areas, with many examples still standing in the historic areas of Damascus, Aleppo, Cairo, Istanbul, Fes, etc.^{[22][23][24][25][16]}

Ibn Battuta, a 14th-century Muslim traveler, described the function of a caravenserai in the region of China:

China is the safest and best country for the traveller. A man travels for nine months alone with great wealth and has nothing to fear. What is responsible for this is that in every post station in their country is funduq which has a director living there with a company of horse and foot. After sunset or nightfall the director comes to the funduq with his secretary and writes down the names of all the travellers who will pass the night there, seals it and locks the door of the fundug. In the morning he and his secretary come and call everybody by name and write down a record. He sends someone with the travellers to conduct them to the next post station and he brings back a certificate from the director of the funduq confirming that they have all arrived. If he does not do this he is answerable for them. This is the procedure in every post station in their country from Sin al-Sin to Khan Baliq. In them is everything the traveller needs by way of provisions, especially hens and geese. Sheep are rare among them.^[26]

— Ibn Battuta

In many parts of the Muslim world, caravanserais also provided revenues that were used to fund charitable or religious functions or buildings. These revenues and functions were managed through a waqf, a protected agreement which gave certain buildings and revenues the status of mortmain endowments guaranteed under Islamic law.^[27][28] Many major religious complexes in the Ottoman and Mamluk empires, for example, either included a caravanserai building (like in the külliye of the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul) or drew revenues from one in the area (such as the Wikala al-Ghuri in Cairo, which was built to contribute revenues for the nearby complex of Sultan al-Ghuri).^[25][24][29]

Caravanserai in Arab literature

Al-Muqaddasi the Arab geographer wrote in 985 CE about the hostelries, or wayfarers' inns, in the Province of Palestine, a province at that time listed under the topography of Syria, saying: "Taxes are not heavy in Syria, with the exception of those levied on the Caravanserais (Fanduk); Here, however, the duties are oppressive..."^[30] The reference here being to the imposts and duties charged by government officials on the importation of goods and merchandise, the importers of which and their beasts of burden usually stopping to take rest in these places. Guards were stationed at every gate to ensure that taxes for these goods be paid in full, with the revenues going to the Fatimid kingdom of Egypt.

Architecture

A sample floor plan of a Safavid Empire-era caravanserai in Karaj, Iran

Most typically a caravanserai was a building with a square or rectangular walled exterior, with a single portal wide enough to permit large or heavily laden beasts such as camels to enter. The courtyard was almost always open to the sky, and the inside walls of the enclosure were outfitted with a number of identical animal stalls, bays, niches or chambers to accommodate merchants and their servants, animals, and merchandise.^[31]

Caravanserais provided water for human and animal consumption, washing and ritual purification such as wudu and ghusl. Sometimes they had elaborate public baths (hammams), or other attached amenities such as a fountain or a sabil/sebil. They kept fodder for animals and had shops for travellers where they could acquire new supplies. Some shops bought goods from the travelling merchants.^[32] Many caravanserais were equipped with small mosques, such as the elevated examples in the Seljuk and Ottoman caravanserais in Turkey.^[25][33][24]

In Cairo, starting in the Burji Mamluk period, wikalas (urban caravanserais) were frequently several stories tall and often included a rab', a low-income rental apartment complex, which was situated on the upper floors while the merchant accommodations occupied the lower floors.^[34][23] While making the best use of limited space in a crowded city, this provided the building with two sources of revenue which were managed through the waqf system.^[28][35]

Notable caravanserais

The Wikala of Sultan al-Ghuri (1504-05), one of the best-preserved examples in Cairo

Gallery

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  16th century Akbari Sarai in Lahore, Pakistan

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  Fallujah's Caravanserai in use, ca. 1914, Iraq

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  An 1850 drawing of Khan al-Tujjar, near Mount Tabor, Israel

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  Khan al-Umdan in Acre, Israel

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  Khan al-Wazir, Aleppo, Syria

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  Inside the Orbelian's Caravanserai, Armenia

• 

  The interior of the Caravanserai of Sa'd al-Saltaneh in Qazvin, Iran

• 

  The caravanserai of Shah Abbas, now Abbasi Hotel, in Isfahan, Iran. View is from the courtyard (sahn).

• 

  An abandoned caravanserai in Neyestānak, Iran

• 

  The courtyard of the Koza Han (1490-91) of Bursa, Turkey; the domed building is a small mosque (mescit)

• 

  18th-century^[36] caravanserai in Sheki, Azerbaijan

• 

  Multani Caravanserai, Baku, Azerbaijan

• 

  The Caravenserai Mosque in Murshidabad, India; built by Nawab Murshid Quli Khan of Bengal

• 

  An 1823 etching of Bara Katra, or Great Caravanserai, in Dhaka, Bangladesh; built by the Mughal Prince Shah Shuja

• 

  An 1817 sketch of the Choto Katra caravanserai in Dhaka, Bangladesh; built by the Mughal viceroy Shaista Khan

• 

  Anderkilla in Chittagong, Bangladesh

• 

  The entrance portal of the Wikala of Sultan Qaytbay, dating from 1477, south of Al-Azhar Mosque, Cairo

• 

  Corral del Carbón, a former caravanserai in Granada, Spain

• 

  The ruins of a Silk Road caravanserai in Tash Rabat, Kyrgyzstan

• 

  Titi Caravanserai

See also

References

Further reading

• Branning, Katharine. 2018. turkishhan.org, The Seljuk Han in Anatolia. New York, USA.
• Cytryn-Silverman, Katia. 2010. The Road Inns (Khans) in Bilad al-Sham. BAR (British Archaeological Reports), Oxford. ISBN 9781407306711
• Kīānī, Moḥammad-Yūsuf; Kleiss, Wolfram (1990). "Caravansary". Encyclopaedia Iranica, Vol. IV, Fasc. 7. pp. 798–802.
• Erdmann, Kurt, Erdmann, Hanna. 1961. Das anatolische Karavansaray des 13. Jahrhunderts, 3 vols. Berlin: Mann, 1976, ISBN 3-7861-2241-5
• Gibb, H.A.R. (2010), The Travels of Ibn Battuta, AD 1325-1354, Volume IV
• Hillenbrand, Robert. 1994. Islamic Architecture: Form, function and meaning. New York: Columbia University Press. (see Chapter VI for an in depth overview of the caravanserai).
• Kiani, Mohammad Yusef. 1976. Caravansaries in Khorasan Road. Reprinted from: Traditions Architecturales en Iran, Tehran, No. 2 & 3, 1976.
• Schutyser, Tom. 2012. Caravanserai: Traces, Places, Dialogue in the Middle East. Milan: 5 Continents Editions, ISBN 978-88-7439-604-7
• Yavuz, Aysil Tükel. 1997. The Concepts that Shape Anatolian Seljuq Caravansara. In: Gülru Necipoglu (ed). 1997. Muqarnas XIV: An Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 80–95.

External links

Look up caravanserai in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Caravanserais.

• Shah Abbasi Caravanserai, Tishineh
• Caravansara Pictures
• Consideratcaravanserai.net, Texts and photos on research on caravanserais and travel journeys in Middle East and Central Asia.
• Caravanserais (Kervansaray) in Turkey
• The Seljuk Han in Anatolia
• Persian Caravanserai, UNESCO application