The Chehel Sotoun ("Forty Columns") is a seventeenth-century pleasure pavilion set in a garden west of Naqsh-e Jahan Square. Built by Shah Abbas II around 1647, it served as a reception hall for important guests and a place of royal leisure. The building's most famous feature is its wide columned portico, supported by twenty slender wooden pillars whose reflections in the long ornamental pool in front create the illusion of forty. The interior contains a series of large figurative paintings depicting historical battles and royal banquets — scenes of wine, music, and celebration that are unusually candid for a building of the period. The pavilion and its gardens are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, listed as part of the Persian Garden.
Chehel Sotoun
Safavid pavilion whose "forty columns" are twenty plus their reflections
A story
The name means "Forty Columns" but the pavilion has only twenty wooden pillars. The other twenty are their reflections in the long ornamental pool that stretches in front of the portico — a typically Persian play on number and appearance. Shah Abbas II used the pavilion to receive foreign ambassadors, and the large paintings inside the reception hall depict those occasions with considerable diplomatic swagger.