Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderHistory fact

Marco Polo spread the story that the Nizari Ismailis, a Shia Muslim group famous for political killings, drugged young recruits and woke them in a lavish garden they took for paradise. No Muslim source of the time supports it, and Polo passed through Persia years after their stronghold of Alamut had fallen.

Marco Polo

Religion & BeliefHistory

The story behind the card

The legend grew in Crusader Syria, where Europeans called the local Nizari leader Rashid al-Din Sinan (died 1193) the 'Old Man of the Mountain' and told of followers who would die at his command. Marco Polo, travelling through Persia in the early 1270s, set the story there and gave it its most famous form, with a hidden garden, a drug and a staged awakening. Neither the Nizaris' own writings nor the Muslim authors hostile to them describe anything like it. The tale says a great deal about how medieval Europe imagined the Nizaris, and very little about Alamut.

Türkçe oku
Marco Polo, siyasi suikastlarıyla tanınan Şii topluluk Nizari İsmaililer hakkında bir hikâyeyi yaydı: Genç adamlar uyuşturulup cennet sandıkları görkemli bir bahçede uyandırılıyormuş. O dönemin hiçbir Müslüman kaynağı bunu doğrulamaz; üstelik Polo İran'dan geçtiğinde, topluluğun kalesi Alamut düşeli yıllar olmuştu.

Efsane Haçlıların Suriye'sinde doğdu. Avrupalılar oradaki Nizari önder Reşidüddin Sinan'a (ö. 1193) “Dağın Yaşlı Adamı” diyor, onun bir sözüyle ölüme giden adamlarından söz ediyordu. 1270'lerin başında İran'dan geçen Marco Polo hikâyeyi bu topraklara taşıdı ve ona en bilinen biçimini verdi: gizli bir bahçe, uyuşturucu ve sahnelenmiş bir uyanış. Ne Nizarilerin kendi yazıları ne de onlara düşman Müslüman yazarlar böyle bir şeyden söz eder. Hikâye bize Alamut'tan çok, Orta Çağ Avrupası'nın Nizarileri nasıl hayal ettiğini anlatır.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Marco Polo
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderArchitecture

Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, finished in 537 as the cathedral of Constantinople, has one of the most influential interiors in architecture. Its great dome rests on pendentives, curved triangles of masonry that let a round dome sit on a square plan, and 40 windows around its base fill it with light.

Emperor Justinian I ordered the church after riots in 532 burned down its predecessor. Two scholars, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, both skilled in mathematics and mechanics, designed it, and it was finished in under six years. The dome is about 31 metres across and its crown rises some 55 metres above the floor. The historian Procopius wrote that it seemed not to rest on masonry but to hang from heaven on a golden chain. Earthquakes brought part of the first dome down in 558, and it was rebuilt higher and steeper. The building was a cathedral for over 900 years, a mosque after the Ottoman conquest of 1453 and a museum from 1934, and it has been a mosque again since 2020.

Hagia SophiaRead card
WonderArchitecture

The eleven churches of Lalibela in northern Ethiopia were carved out of solid volcanic rock in the Middle Ages, each shaped from the top down inside deep trenches, and they are still a place of pilgrimage for Ethiopian Christians.

Tradition credits the churches to King Gebre Meskel Lalibela of the Zagwe dynasty, who reigned around the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries; archaeologists think some parts are older, and the building sequence is still debated. Legend says he meant the site as a new Jerusalem after Saladin captured Jerusalem in 1187, and many places there carry biblical names, such as a stream called the Jordan. Masons first cut trenches to free a block of rock, then hollowed out rooms, columns, windows and doors from it; the most famous church, Bete Giyorgis, is shaped like a cross when seen from above. Tunnels link the churches, which are still in daily use. UNESCO listed them as a World Heritage Site in 1978.

Rock-Hewn Churches, LalibelaRead card
WonderArchitecture

The Great Mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia, founded in 670 and largely rebuilt in 836, is one of the oldest mosques in the Islamic world. Its courtyard, columned prayer hall and square minaret became a model for mosques across North Africa.

The Arab general Uqba ibn Nafi chose the site when he founded the city of Kairouan in 670. The mosque was rebuilt several times, and most of what stands today dates from the reconstruction ordered by Emir Ziyadat Allah I in 836. Its prayer hall is hypostyle, meaning the roof rests on rows of columns: 414 of them, in marble, granite and porphyry, taken from ancient sites such as Carthage, so their shafts and capitals vary. The 31.5-metre minaret, rising in three stages from a square base, is thought to be the oldest minaret still standing. The mosque became a model for later mosques across the Maghreb, the part of North Africa west of Egypt, and is part of Kairouan's World Heritage Site.

Great Mosque of KairouanRead card
WonderHistory

Ise Grand Shrine, the holiest site of Shinto, Japan's native religion, takes down its main sanctuaries every 20 years and rebuilds them exactly on the plot next door. The custom began in 690 and, despite some long interruptions, continues today; the next rebuilding is due in 2033.

The rebuilding is called Shikinen Sengū. Along with the buildings, the shrine's furnishings and sacred objects are made anew, and the wooden Uji Bridge at the entrance is rebuilt too. The timber is hinoki, a Japanese cypress. Power tools are not allowed within the shrine grounds, so the work falls to miyadaiku, carpenters trained in traditional shrine building; less experienced carpenters usually learn on the bridge before they work on the sanctuaries. Shinto calls the idea tokowaka, 'ever young': renewing a sacred building keeps it fresh and passes the skills from one generation to the next. The present buildings, from 2013, are the 62nd set. Wars have delayed the cycle more than once, most notably for over a century during Japan's civil wars of the 15th and 16th centuries.

Ise Shikinen SenguRead card
WonderReligion & Belief

The Dead Sea Scrolls, found in caves near Qumran from 1947 onwards, are Jewish manuscripts copied between about the 3rd century BC and the 1st century AD. Among them is the Great Isaiah Scroll, from around 125 BC: all 66 chapters of the Book of Isaiah on one scroll more than seven metres long.

The first seven scrolls were found in 1946–47 by Bedouin shepherds in a cave about 1.5 km from the north-western shore of the Dead Sea. By 1956 eleven caves around Qumran had yielded pieces of 981 different manuscripts, mostly in Hebrew, some in Aramaic and Greek. Many scholars link them with the Essenes, a strict Jewish group of the time, though others think they came from Jerusalem priests or other groups. Most survive only as fragments of parchment and papyrus. Copies or pieces of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther have been identified. The Isaiah scroll, 17 sheets of parchment sewn together, is the only Qumran scroll preserved almost whole, and it is about a thousand years older than the oldest Hebrew Bible manuscripts known before the discovery. It is kept at the Shrine of the Book in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Ikigai DailyRead card
Next card in the archiveThe famous Persian tale that Omar Khayyam, Nizam al-Mulk and Hasan-i Sabbah were schoolfriends cannot be true: Nizam al-Mulk was about thirty years older than the other two. In the story, the three boys swear that whoever rises first will help the others.Read next →