Middle East NE P153e 20000 rials 2021 UNC—blue—wind catchers

Issuer: BMJEI
Colors: Blue with green accents
Front: religious/political leader
Back: Aghazadeh mansion in Abarkhooh, featuring its wind catchers
Watermark: religious/political leader
Signatures: AK, FD

Wind catchers (bagdir) in Abarkhooh

Wind catchers, locally called badgir, are vertical ventilation towers designed to cool buildings naturally in hot, dry climates. They represent a refined form of passive climate control developed long before mechanical cooling.

In towns like Abarkooh, where summers are harsh and water scarce, badgirs were not decorative flourishes but necessities. Rising above mudbrick rooftops, they capture prevailing breezes and channel them downward into interior rooms. As air moves through the structure, warmer air is displaced and expelled, creating constant circulation.

Many Abarkooh wind catchers were paired with underground water systems—cisterns or qanats—so incoming air passed over cool surfaces or water, lowering the temperature further through evaporation. Thick earthen walls and shaded courtyards worked in tandem with the towers, slowing heat gain and stabilizing indoor temperatures across day and night cycles.

Architecturally, Abarkooh’s badgirs tend to be restrained and pragmatic rather than monumental, reflecting a town shaped by endurance and continuity rather than imperial display. Their geometry—clean shafts, sharp openings, careful orientation—embodies a deep empirical understanding of wind, pressure, and thermal mass.

Seen today, they read as both sculpture and system: quiet evidence that sustainability, when born of necessity, can also be beautiful.

Abarkooh is a small desert town shaped by scarcity, continuity, and quiet ingenuity. Known for its ancient cypress tree, mudbrick architecture, qanats, and wind catchers, it reflects a way of life finely tuned to heat, wind, and water over many centuries. Less monumental than larger cities, Abarkooh feels intimate and pragmatic—a place where environmental intelligence is embedded in everyday structures rather than grand statements, and where history survives not as spectacle but as lived texture.