Maku

Maku itself hasn’t much to offer so I rented a taxi for a half day (200,000 rial) and drove to the nearby attractions. And there’s some irony in the fact that the first sight I visited in Iran was a christian church.

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Ali with his taxi.

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The black church. The name comes form the old part on the left the bright part were added later.

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Armenian

The first church was founded in 43 AD by St. Thaddaeus. The Armenian king didn’t like the success of the conversions and killed all followers of Taddaeus. Yet in 301 AD Armenia became the first country to accept christianity as state religion and in 375 the church was rebuild.

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Farsi and armenian

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and even russian 😉

The second attraction was a monument commemorating the battle of Chaldoran where 26,000 of the 27,000 persian soldiers fighting the Osman Sultan Selim where killed by the latters secret weapon, the cannon in 1514

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There’s a cemetary with soldiers of a more recent war (Iraq-Iran)

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On the way back we had the in this establishment.

The Iranians way of drinking tea is quite strange:
You take a sugar cube and but it between your teeth and then drink the tea. Thus the sugar dissolves in your mouth and the tea is sweetened.

On the 20th of September I took a bus to Tabriz.