Hormuz Made Isfahan Rich. Now Hormuz Is Helping Burn It.
Shah Abbas helped turn Isfahan into one of the great cities of the early modern world after securing Hormuz. Four centuries later, Isfahan is again paying the price of the strait that once financed its glory.
The strangest thing about Isfahan burning is that, in a very old sense, it was always tied to Hormuz.
Shah Abbas I made Isfahan the Safavid capital and turned it into one of the most beautiful cities on earth. He also helped drive the Portuguese out of Hormuz in 1622 with English assistance, tightening Persian control over the Gulf's most important commercial gateway. The wealth of that trade world helped sustain the city he was building: mosques, palaces, squares, pavilions, prestige.
Four centuries later, the same strategic geometry has come back with a vengeance.
Al Jazeera reported overnight that fresh U.S.-Israeli strikes hit Isfahan, producing a huge column of fire near the Badr military airbase. Separate heritage reporting this month has already described damage to historic areas in and around Naqsh-e Jahan Square, while Blue Shield and other cultural bodies have warned that attacks on Iranian heritage sites could amount to war-crime territory if the pattern continues.
That is what makes Isfahan so loaded symbolically. It is not just another military city. It is a place where Persian statecraft, commerce, faith, aesthetics and imperial memory all overlap.
And in 2026, they overlap with the war's most explosive strategic layers too.
Isfahan is not only the city Abbas built after Hormuz helped reshape Safavid power. It is also part of the geography around which modern Iran's strategic core is organized: military infrastructure, industrial systems, and, in the broader public imagination, the deeper nuclear question. That means every strike there feels doubly charged — contemporary and civilizational at once.
The tragedy is almost historical in its symmetry.
In the seventeenth century, control of Hormuz helped fund glory inland. In the twenty-first, the weaponization of Hormuz is helping pull war back onto the inland city that glory built.
The geography has not moved. The chokepoint has not moved. The logic has not moved either.
Who controls the strait still shapes who prospers and who burns.
That is why Isfahan matters so much in this war. Not just because it is under attack, but because it reminds everyone that Persian power has always been a bargain between inland civilization and maritime leverage.
When the second half of that bargain turns violent, the first half lights up in the night sky.