A couple of weeks after my first Iranian missive, I wrote again:
Salaam from Tehran, where my trip in Iran is drawing to a close, and I’m mentally preparing for the long trek home (five days via Istanbul, Sofia, Belgrade, Zagreb, Munich, Stuttgart, and Paris).
When I last wrote, from the city of Shiraz, I had seen the beautiful mosques and palaces of Esfahan, met lots of friendly Iranians, and started to understand some of the country’s apparent contradictions. Since then I have been fortunate to meet people from a wider range of backgrounds and ethnicities – as well as visiting far more different landscapes than I had expected to find in Iran, sandy deserts to green mountains.
From Shiraz I visited the ruins of Persepolis, ceremonial capital of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. It is a large site outside the city, on the edge of the mountains, and contains beautiful carvings: winged sphinxes guarding the entrances, and reliefs of scores of life-size soldiers guarding its stairways. I saw the graves of several ancient Persian kings, including Xerxes I, Darius I and II, and Artaxerxes I. It was a heady experience to see graves of kings whose names, at least, I know so well from my studies (the Hebrew part) and even classical music – and who our culture vaguely connects with an idea of the romance of the Orient. Unfortunately, one major notable at Persepolis was the graffiti on the most impressive statues guarding the entrances. The most extensive graffiti was from Victorians: they had not left hasty scrawls, but rather had painstakingly engraved the insignia of their battalions and their commanders’s names. It was shocking that even with the time to think about it, anyone could vandalise ancient statues in this way, and the fact that it was Brits that had done it left me feeling rather humiliated.
In Shiraz I further visited an English-Iranian friend’s aunt, Azadeh Khalili, who lives in West London but spends a month each summer attending to the affairs of her family estate, where she is a trustee. The house is antique and grand, and it was enlightening to have an insight into the real-life difficulties of running a viable business, given today’s huge inflation and other economic difficulties – how to deal with staff, and explain to tenants that rents will have to increase. The property also contains a garden, the Bage-e Khalili, which was started by Azadeh’s grandfather but today is one of few such remaining in the city. It is extensive, landscaped, and varied, with fig-trees and pomegranates, ponds and fountains, climbing flowers, and tall cypress trees. I’ve visited a few UNESCO-listed Persian Gardens here, but this visit was the most enjoyable – it was a real privilege to be shown around by the owner of such a fantastic, lived-in garden.
From Shiraz, and travelling with an excellent new Belgian friend called Ebe, I had arranged to visit a nomadic family’s tents. To our excellent fortune, our guide, Bahman, further invited us to a nomadic wedding the evening before our visit. These nomads are Qashqai, a Turkic ethnic group: they speak a Turkic language and have different, more colourful clothes than Iranians in nearby cities. We heard that weddings in the countryside can have 2000 guests, but this was in a Qashqai village on the edge of Shiraz and merely had 100 or so. When we arrived, the women were already dancing to traditional music, slowly stepping round in a large circle and holding brightly dyed scarves where they held hands. There were hours of Qashqai music, with some Kurdish and Iranian music mixed in. The dancing was briefly interrupted as the bride and groom arrived, to shotgun-fire, but otherwise carried on until the early hours. I was able to join in and earned some approving smiles from chubby Qashqai grannies – it was memorable indeed to be able to dance the night away amongst the women’s huge, colourful dresses, the blaring music, and the twirling scarves.
After a night in a nomads’ tent with Bahman’s family, I moved on to Yazd, an old mud-brick desert city and a centre of Zoroastrianism. It has huge, and very old, Towers of Silence, a little distance outsider the town. Towers of Silence are where the Zoroastrian dead are traditionally left, for their remains to be eaten by vultures. These were very atmospheric, as I have found these towers to be in the past as well (for example in the Wakhan Corridor in Tajikistan); I think this is down to their great age, simple design, and often to their inspiring location: these were on the edge of the mountains and had an impressive view over the town. At the bottom of the towers there were the remains of several mud-buildings, where families would have stayed while they waited for the remains of the deceased to be picked clean – this struck me as a bleak, yet perhaps effective, kind of enforced mourning-period.
Via a fun exploration of a crumbling Sassanid fort at Saryazd – in Europe you don’t often get an a castle to yourself, with broken staircases to scramble up and ancient amphorae luring behind broken walls – I spent a night in the desert. I walked amongst sand dunes that trick the sense of perspective crazily, under an amazingly full moon that cast amazingly defined shadows and almost enough light to read by.
I mention the desert by way of contrast to the Alamut Valley, in the north of the country, where I was the next day. For a couple of days I walked in high, cool, mountains, with sunflowers, paddy fields, and waterfalls. I met several groups of middle-class Tehranis who come up here to escape the summer city-heat, and it was nice to meet them in such relaxed circumstances; this social class usually speaks English as well.
Happily, my Farsi is also now at a level that I can have relatively meaningful conversations with a lot of people I meet – and taxi-driver conversation is definitely in hand. In Yazd, a Baluchi man (Baluchistan is the border region between Iran and Pakistan – drug-smuggling land) who gave me a lift on his motorbike invited me into his home, one of the old houses that sit behind mysterious mud-brick doors on narrow alleys in the old city: inside it was spacious, with two grand, decrepit courtyards. He was extremely friendly, and offered me water-pipe and fresh figs. He’d converted to Christianity – itself a capital crime – and asked me whether I could bring a Farsi bible next time I come to Iran, as he can’t get one here himself. I tried to explain the potential legal difficulties, but, my police issues aside, this was a seemingly minor yet pertinent demonstration of what a lack of religious freedom means: a kind and generous man isn’t allowed to access his holy book.
Now I’m back in Tehran, and on Monday I’ll take the bus to Istanbul. This morning I was lucky enough to go to synagogue here: Iran has an ancient Jewish community, and Tehran alone has 5,000 – 10,000 Jews. I’d made contact before I came, which was a good thing, as I don’t imagine that foreign visitors are common – no American or Israeli Jews coming here. I’d written to a man called Arash, who prays at a small synagogue to help ensure they get ten men (ten are needed to say certain prayers – in liberal communities women are also counted). The synagogue was welcoming, and the service largely familiar, with just some intriguing differences: there were rugs on the floor so I went barefoot, the prayer-books had a fascinating (if unsurprising) mixture of Hebrew and Farsi, and kiddush was served during the service (after Shacharit) and consisted of tea and dates. I was fortunate to be given a couple of honours during the service, including my first Hagbah, something I’ll remember, although all of these are otherwise auctioned off during the service to members of the community. I’ve heard that Iranian Jews also tend to speak a dialect like Middle Persian, and sometimes write poetry in Farsi Khoot: Farsi written in Hebrew characters.
As always, I imagine the full worth of this trip won’t become clear until I’m home and have a chance to revisit my observations in the context of everyday life. However, while I go home with the best impressions of Iran, as expected, I also have much more appreciation of the contrasts to be found amongst its people and landscapes, and some of the everyday challenges faced by people here. As before I can only recommend visiting Iran – other than a fair few Dutch, Belgians, Italians and Spanish, there are few tourists here. You’ll have a very warm welcome.
Khoda hafez from Teheran!
And how have my observations developed with the fullness of time? When I think of Iran now, I no longer think of it as a romantic Orient, a wonderful land to the east. For one thing, it’s harder to maintain as much notion of romance when I keep in touch with the locals I met on Facebook Messenger. More importantly, I now see that Iran’s not an adjunct to a Eurocentric world but rather the centre of its own, and has been for millennia. That fact looks obvious now I write it – but it’s social shifts in the past few years which have helped me understand more deeply the equivalence of different cultures across the world. I’ve also been thinking about the nature of travel in general, and unfortunately I no longer see how medium or long-distance travel is sustainable for an exponentially growing middle-class. So I recommend a visit to Iran, but not if you need to fly. The sums don’t add up. But that’s a thought for another blog.
