Note 8 — Chapter XV · AT ERIVAN

One might expect to find some mosques of considerable age in a city which flourished under its Mohammedan masters. One must, however, recollect that the Ottoman Turks are Sunnis and the Persians Shiahs; what the one may erect the other loves to destroy. We are expressly told that when Shah Safi took the place in A.D. 1635 all the mosques built by the Turks were razed to the ground.8 About the same time the position of the town, or perhaps only of the fortress, underwent a change, being removed some eight hundred paces to its present site on the rocky cliffs at the foot of which the Zanga flows.9 The Persians do not appear to have enriched it at that period with any remarkable buildings; and it was recovered by the Turks in 1724.10 Some ten years later it again fell into the hands of the Persians as one of the conquests of Nadir Shah. The principal mosque is said to date from the reign of this monarch. The curious old tower which was seen by Chardin as well as by Tournefort, and of which the lineaments have been handed down to us by the former of these travellers, has long since disappeared.