Seen from a distance, Robat-e Sharaf reads as a low fortress in an empty landscape: a rectangle of brick with corner towers and a single monumental portal. Inside, the building is far more ambitious than shelter alone would require. Two courtyards follow one another, each ringed by vaulted halls and iwans, and the surfaces are worked in patterned brickwork and carved stucco of a quality usually reserved for palaces and mosques. It belongs to the great period of Seljuk building in Khorasan, when the roads of north-eastern Iran carried merchants, pilgrims and officials across long waterless stages. The programme films the complex in 4K, following the geometry of vaults and the raking light that reveals the decoration, and situates it within the network of roads that structured the medieval Iranian world.
