About
A garden, not a marketplace.
Bostan (بستان) is the Persian word for garden — an orchard, a planted place, something cultivated over years rather than built overnight. That is the idea behind this site.
What this is
Bostan is an independent, non-commercial guide to the cultures, history and everyday life of the Middle East and North Africa. It exists for one reason: most English-language travel content about the region is either thin, commercial, or written by people who have never been. We wanted something better, so we started building it.
The guides here are slow and opinionated. We name our sources, we say when a place is overrated, and we treat the region as twenty-plus countries with distinct histories — not a single sand-coloured blur.
What this is not
- No advertising. No display ads, no sponsored posts, no paid placements.
- No affiliate links. We don't earn anything when you book something.
- No press-trip junkets. Nobody paid for our words, so nobody owns them.
- Not a news site. We write about culture and travel, not politics.
Independence is expensive and slow, which is why it's rare. It is also the only way to say "skip this place" without a conflict of interest. The cost of that honesty is that the site grows slowly — a handful of guides per month, done properly, forever.
How the guides are made
Every guide draws on named, verifiable sources — UNESCO World Heritage documentation, national statistics offices, official tourism bodies, and published research. Where we include facts (dates, inscription years, site dimensions), they come from those sources and are linked at the end of each article.
Our imagery follows two rules, and we hold ourselves to both:
- Photographs are either our own or come from free-license sources (Wikimedia Commons, Unsplash, Pexels), always credited to the photographer.
- Illustrations are AI-generated and always labelled as such — used for section covers and decorative purposes only, never presented as documentary photography.
Corrections and contact
We are one small site covering an enormous region, which means we will get things wrong. If you spot an error — a fact, a name, a nuance — we genuinely want to hear it: hello@bostan.com. Corrections are fixed and noted at the bottom of the article.
The name
Bostan appears across Persian, Turkish, Urdu and Arabic (بوستان / بُستان), always meaning a garden or orchard. The 11th-century Persian poet Sadi called his famous work the Bustan — a garden of prose and verse. The bostans of the region are also literal: centuries-old courtyard gardens, irrigated by qanats, that made deserts bloom. This site is our small act of planting one.