On the southern edge of a small town near the Afghan border, a long earthen wall carries a row of windmills roughly a thousand years old. They are built of clay, straw and wood, their sails set on upright shafts, and in the fierce eastern wind they still do the one thing they were made to do: grind wheat into flour. Europe's famous old windmills have long since stopped and become monuments. These have not. They are among the oldest working windmills on earth — kept turning, now, largely by one man.
Nashtifan (نشتیفان) is a small town in Khaf County, in Razavi Khorasan, in the far east of Iran — about 40 km from the Afghan border, out on a flat, dry, windswept plain. Its name is worth knowing before anything else: it is thought to come from nish-toofan, the sting of the storm. This is one of the windiest inhabited places in Iran, scoured for months each year by a gale strong enough to make ordinary life hard. The windmills — locally called asbads (آسباد) — are the town's answer to that gale, and they also give it its common English name, the Nashtifan windmills.
They stand in a line along the town's southern edge, mounted on a long earthen wall that rises to about twenty metres. The wall does two jobs at once, and this is the first clever thing about the place: it carries the mills up into the strongest wind, and it shelters the town behind it from that same wind. A defence and a machine in one structure. Roughly thirty asbads stand here (with many more scattered across Khaf County), and a handful of them still work.
They are made of the plainest materials imaginable: clay, straw and wood, the same earth the town is built from. No metal in the working parts, no mortar holding a grand façade together — just packed adobe towers and hand-cut wooden blades. And yet the design inside them is old and exact enough that most historians credit Iran's east with inventing the windmill itself, and this corner of Khorasan with keeping the oldest working examples of it. What looks at a glance like a row of mud ruins is, in fact, a line of functioning machines that predate every windmill in Europe.
Nashtifan sits in Iran's far east near Khaf, about 40 km from the Afghan border; the windmills line the town's southern edge. Coordinates are approximate. The nearest major hub is Mashhad, roughly 250 km to the northeast.
The whole cleverness of the asbad is in one choice: its sails turn on an upright shaft, not a horizontal one. Picture the Dutch or Greek windmill you know — the sails face you like a wheel, spinning on a horizontal axle, and inside, that spin has to be turned through ninety degrees by gears before it can drive a grindstone lying flat below. The asbad skips all of that. Its blades stand vertically and turn a vertical shaft that runs straight down to the millstone. No gears, no right-angle, no wasted parts — the wind's push goes directly into the grinding.
Each asbad is a two-storey tower. The upper level is a wind chamber — eight compartments, each holding six tall wooden blades (bundled reeds or planks, roughly five metres high) on the central shaft. One side of the tower is open to the prevailing wind; the other is walled. This wall is not just a housing — it is the whole trick. Because the blades sit on a vertical shaft, at any moment half of them are swinging back into the wind; if the wind could reach both sides equally, it would push the two halves against each other and nothing would turn. The wall shields the returning half, so the wind only ever pushes the open side, and the shaft spins steadily one way. Below sits the millroom, with the grindstones and a hopper of wheat above them. As the shaft turns, the stones turn; the turning also sets up a steady vibration that shakes grain down from a hopper above into the stones, so the feed matches the speed of the wind. When the wind is strong, a single asbad can grind well over a hundred kilograms of wheat — and because the wind itself regulates the feed, no one has to stand and operate it.
From the ground the asbads read as a rough mud wall with slots in it. Up close they resolve into a precise, repeated machine:
The long earthen bank the mills sit on — part launch pad (lifting the blades into the strongest wind) and part shield (breaking that wind for the town behind). One structure doing both jobs.
The upper storey, open to the north. Wind funnels into the chambers and pushes the vertical wooden blades, spinning the central shaft always in one direction.
The lower storey, where the shaft's turning drives the grindstones. Wheat drops from a hopper above; the harder the wind, the faster the feed — a mill that adjusts itself.
Everything is made from what the desert offers — packed clay, straw for binding, wood for the blades and shaft. Nothing has to be imported, and anything that breaks can be remade on site.
Plenty of places have famous old windmills. The difference at Nashtifan is that its mills are not just old — they still function. The celebrated windmills of Kinderdijk in the Netherlands, or the row above the harbour at Mykonos, are preserved as monuments; they no longer do the work they were built for. Several of the Nashtifan asbads, when the wind blows, still grind wheat into flour exactly as they did centuries ago. That makes this one of the very few places on earth where thousand-year-old windmills are working machines rather than photographs of themselves.
The asbad's ancestry runs deep in this region. The earliest references to windmills anywhere are to Persian mills of the 7th to 10th centuries — Encyclopaedia Britannica points to a Persian millwright in 644 CE and to mills at Sistan by 915 CE — and the design is generally thought to have originated in Sistan, further south in Iran's windy east, as an answer to the same problem: relentless wind, and too little water to run a watermill. From there the idea spread — east toward China under the Mongols, west into the Islamic world and eventually to Europe, which adapted it into the horizontal-axis form. Nashtifan holds one of the finest surviving stands of the original vertical kind. (The very first written mention, in the account of the caliph Umar's death in 644 CE, already names a Persian captive skilled at building such mills — so the technology was mature by then, and older still than the record.)
How long the mills have already been standing is captured in one small detail: when National Geographic photographed the snow-covered town in 1909, the stepped windmill walls are already there in the background — and were already old. Whatever their exact age, they were an antiquity a century before most of today's visitors were born.
It is worth being honest about what this design is and isn't. The asbad is a drag machine: the wind simply pushes the sails, which means the blades can never turn faster than the wind itself. The horizontal windmill Europe later built, and every modern turbine, works by lift instead — like an aircraft wing — and can spin faster than the wind and extract far more power. By that measure the asbad is rudimentary and inefficient. Its genius is not efficiency but fit: it is simple enough to build from mud and wood, needs no gears, repairs itself with local materials, and asks nothing of a place except the one thing this place has too much of — wind.
For decades the working mills of Nashtifan have depended, to a large degree, on a single person: Ali-Mohammad Etebari, a former driver who — by his own account in 2015 — had by then spent some 28 years on the daily inspection and repair of the asbads: climbing them, replacing worn blades, keeping the shafts free, coaxing the old machines through each windy season. He has drawn no salary for it. Iran has honoured him as a Living Human Treasure, and much of the reason the mills still turn at all is simply that he has not let them stop.
He has also been plain about what comes next. In his own blunt words to a visiting film crew: “If I don't look after them, the youngsters will come and spoil it and break everything.” The young of the town, understandably, have easier ways to make flour and easier work to do; few want to inherit an unpaid job maintaining mud-and-wood machines. If no one takes over when Etebari is gone, the knowledge that keeps these particular thousand-year-old mills working could go with him. The wall will stand. Whether the blades keep turning is a more fragile question.
Nashtifan is an easy place to visit and a heavy one to take in. There is no climb, no danger, no real difficulty beyond the heat and the wind and the long drive to reach Iran's far east — so it scores low on adventure. Its weight is all in legacy: a working thousand-year-old machine, a piece of engineering that beat Europe to the windmill by centuries, and the human thread of a single keeper holding it together. This is a site you come to for what it means, not for what it demands of you.
You come over the edge of the town and there it is: a long earthen wall, and along the top of it a row of squat towers with wooden blades showing through their slots. If there's no wind, they're silent, and it takes a moment to understand you're looking at machines at all. Then a gust comes down off the plain — and one of them starts to turn. A low wooden groan, a creak of the shaft, and the blades begin to swing, slowly, then steadily, catching the wind that has been trying to knock you flat since you arrived.
Follow the sound down into the millroom and the payoff is complete. The same shaft you saw turning up top runs down through the ceiling and drives a heavy round stone, and under that stone, wheat is quietly becoming flour. No motor, no wires, no one at the controls — just the wind coming in one open wall of a mud tower and, a few feet away, bread's first ingredient collecting in a pale heap. A machine with no fuel and almost no moving parts, doing real work, exactly as it did a thousand years ago.
And then the thing that stays with you longest: someone still has to keep this alive by hand. The mills don't run themselves through the centuries; a man climbs them, mends them, clears them, year after year, for nothing. You are watching a thousand-year-old machine work — and, at the same time, watching how close it is to stopping.
A town that took the storm trying to drive it out and set it to grinding bread — and a thousand years on, when the wind comes down off the plain, the wooden blades still turn.
There's a real tension here: the wind that turns the mills is strongest in high summer, which is also the hottest, harshest time to stand out on the plain. Cooler months are pleasanter but the sails may be still. Decide what you came for — the machine working, or the comfortable visit.
Roughly late May to late September is the season of the 120-day wind, when you have the best chance of seeing the blades actually spinning and grinding. Come prepared for strong wind, blowing dust and real heat.
Shoulder seasons give kinder weather and good light, but the wind is less reliable, so the mills may stand still. Fine if you want the structures and the calm; less certain for seeing them work.
Whenever you go, mornings give the best light on the adobe and the best chance of finding the custodian at work among the mills. Ask locally whether the wind — and the keeper — are about that day.
An easy, free, open-air site in a remote corner of Iran — the practicalities are about reaching it, the heat and wind, and visiting a living heritage site with respect.
Nashtifan is free and open, but genuinely remote — the effort is all in the journey.
Nashtifan is a small town in Khaf County, Razavi Khorasan Province, in far eastern Iran, about 40 km from the Afghan border. The nearest city is Khaf; the usual approach is from Mashhad (roughly 250 km northeast) via Torbat-e Heydarieh and Khaf, then a short drive to the town's southern edge where the windmills stand. There is no fee to visit.
An asbad (آسباد) is the traditional Iranian vertical-axis windmill of the eastern deserts. Unlike the horizontal-axis windmills familiar from the Netherlands or Greece, the asbad's sails turn on an upright shaft, so wind funnelled through the tower drives the grindstone directly, with no gearing to change the axis. The design is very old — the earliest references to windmills anywhere are to Persian mills of the 7th to 10th centuries — and is thought to have originated in Sistan, in Iran's windswept east.
They are usually described as about 1,000 years old, an estimate given by the custodian and repeated by most sources. The asbad technology itself is older still — windmills are documented in eastern Iran from the 7th century CE onward. A few sources claim far greater ages, but these are not well supported; roughly a millennium is the figure to trust for the standing mills.
Yes — several of the roughly 30 mills at Nashtifan are still operational and can grind wheat when the wind blows, which makes the site one of the very few places on earth where windmills a thousand years old still function. Most European windmills of comparable fame, such as those at Kinderdijk or Mykonos, no longer work and survive as monuments. At Nashtifan the working mills are kept turning largely by one man.
For decades the mills have been maintained by a single unpaid custodian, Ali-Mohammad Etebari, a former driver honoured by Iran as a “Living Human Treasure” for his daily care of them. He has spoken openly about the site's uncertain future: the young are not taking up the work, and if no one succeeds him, the tradition may end with him. His care is a large part of why the mills still turn at all.
Not yet. Iran registered the Nashtifan windmills as a national heritage site in 2002, and the country's vertical-axis windmills (asbads) are on UNESCO's Tentative List with a view to a future World Heritage nomination. But they have not been inscribed on the World Heritage List itself, so “UNESCO-listed” is not yet accurate.
To see the sails actually spinning you need the wind, which is strongest during the 120-day wind of the eastern deserts, roughly late May to late September. That is also the hottest season, so visits are a trade-off: spring and autumn are more comfortable but the mills may be still, while high summer brings the wind that turns them. Mornings are best for light and for catching the custodian at work.
Nashtifan belongs to this collection's quiet thread about Iranians turning a hostile environment into a working system — the same instinct, met with a different element. Where the desert offered no water, people built the great gravity tunnels of the Qanat of Gonabad, which mined an underground river out of dry ground, and the improbable underground waterworks of the Kariz of Kish, which coaxed fresh water from a coral island with no river at all; where a wild river had to be tamed, they struck a bargain with it at the Shushtar hydraulic system. Nashtifan is the wind chapter of that story: the one place where the problem was not thirst but an unrelenting gale, and the answer was to stand a machine in its path and let it grind.
The nearest city, with the fine Timurid-era Ghiasieh (Khargerd) religious school and other 15th-century monuments — the natural cultural pairing for the mills, and your likely base.
The other great feat of desert engineering in Khorasan — an ancient qanat that mined water from deep underground, the water-answer to Nashtifan's wind-answer. Read the article →
The vast, windswept plains that shaped this whole way of life — the same 120-day wind, the same bare horizons, worth the drive for the emptiness alone.
Far to the south, another improbable answer to a dry place — a fresh-water system dug down into a coral island. Same ingenuity, different element. Read the article →
Give Nashtifan a morning, ideally in the summer wind season when the blades are turning, and greet the custodian if he's about — he is as much a part of the place now as the mills. Come for the machine; leave thinking about how a town met an enemy it couldn't beat, and put it to work instead.
Untamed Iran prefers official and first-hand sources, and separates established fact from the figures that travel media tend to round or inflate. Nashtifan is well documented by UNESCO's tentative-list file and by major outlets that visited the site; this page keeps to the figures that recur across them, flags where ages and counts vary, and notes that the “UNESCO” status is tentative, not inscribed. The following are the sources this page draws on:
Facts last reviewed July 2026. Established: the location in Nashtifan, Khaf County, Razavi Khorasan, near the Afghan border; the vertical-axis, drag-based (panemone) asbad design (eight chambers, six blades each ~5 m tall, clay/straw/wood) and the shielding wall that makes it turn; the ~20 m earthen wall doubling as windbreak; the 120-day wind; several mills still operational; national-heritage registration in 2002; UNESCO Tentative List status; the custodian Ali-Mohammad Etebari (~28 years’ care as of 2015). Varies by source: the number of asbads at Nashtifan (commonly ~30, sometimes given as 36 or “two dozen”; 107 across Khaf County) and how many still work (about five or six); the exact height (~20 m / ~65 ft); distance to the border (~40 km / 30 miles). Estimate, not proven: the ~1,000-year age of the standing mills (the custodian's estimate, widely repeated; the 1909 photo confirms they were already old, but not their exact age); a few sources claim far older dates that aren't well supported. Corrected here: the “UNESCO” status — the asbads are on the Tentative List and registered nationally, but not inscribed as a World Heritage Site. Approximate: coordinates and the map marker.