Overall impressions and summary

Twins and grandmother

We encountered a happy, informed and polite people who welcomed us with a smile or a slight bow, recognising and acknowledging our presence as guests. They are incredibly proud of being Persian and an ancient civilisation that has contributed much to Islam and to the West and retained their own distinct identity. Young families with sleepy toddlers draped over one or other parent, young children wanting to go their own way with parents patiently guiding them – I never heard a raised voice to children, or anyone else for that matter, nor any physical punishment to children. The traffic is chaotic, with motorbikes ridden on pavements or going the wrong way up streets, so crossing a busy road requires confidence and a healthy belief that there will be a future. But only rare horns and never any road rage that we saw.  Very few beggars but quite high levels of youth unemployment. People would guide us, as foreigners, across a street and go back to what they were doing. Young men and women were happy to be photographed and to photograph us and to engage in conversation.

While older women in chadors were sometimes more reserved, old men positively preened for the camera. But all had a quiet dignity and mutual respect. It has been a delight to be a guest in their country.

Mullah

The government is rapidly improving infrastructure with major road, rail and water systems, often under project labour contracts with Chinese or Korean companies under the direction of what are, on evidence, excellent Irani engineers. The big cities, Tehran in particular, are suffering from population pressure from urbanisation and a rapidly increasing disposable income. Cars, buses and motorcycles of many familiar brands cough out pollution that clouds a hot sunny sky with little breeze to shift it. The metros are holes in the ground with no great urgency apparent.

Nomad camp near Yasuj. Enlarge to find the camp!

And as described in Esfahan, the cities are vulnerable to climate change because of their dependence on snow-melt for water, but the tradition is to squander water as an affordable luxury. While the cities and towns are remarkably clean, plastic detritus is a blight on rural roads and vacant blocks of land.

The issues for travelers are the same as any developing country. Toilets are provided in public parks and encourage families to use the grassy areas for picnics. But the flushing systems don’t often work although there is almost always soap and water to wash ones hands. The locals on journey often seem to spurn hotels and camp in collapsible pup tents on sidewalks near a park and toilets. Three or four members of a family will emerge from their portable bedroom and stretch before heading off for a face wash. Presumably there is a thin mattress and blanket on the floor and that’s all that is needed at this time of year. Many of the travellers seemed to be internal tourists reveling in their history or looking for a break on the Caspian like the Shah in his day. Limited and sometimes excellent English is not uncommon, particularly in tourist areas. We were fortunate that there were very few other tour groups around, although we bumped into Australians, Germans, French and Dutch as well as a few from the Balkans. Everyone is very hopeful that the new Prime Minister, Rouhani, can broker a deal with the US over nuclear power and lift sanctions so they can welcome more visitors to their country.

Many apologise for the aggressive rhetoric of Ahmedinijad; however, our sample was limited to those who wanted to engage with us. On the other hand there was very very little evidence of hostility to Americans and much more a wish to be understood.

Go to Iran, particularly before it becomes the next big tourist destination for a jaded West denied access to Iraq, Egypt and Syria by continuing violence. In the hotels we stayed, food was predictable, good and, like all restaurant food, heavy on meat (usually kebabs) and light on fibre and vegetables. Salads at every meal must have been well washed in clean water because tummy troubles were uncommon. The major issue for us was the very dry air and the air-conditioning drying out noses.

Esfahan the glorious

Competing with Istanbul for elegance and beauty, Esfahan in the 16^th C was the jewel of the Savafids in their Golden Age under Shah Abbas I. Abbas forcibly translocated Armenian Christain merchants and their extensive trading networks to run the state silk monoply. Jews were already running the banking system and he developed a reliable tax system that gave him the resources to create a standing army to suppress tribal squabbles and push back Ottoman and Turkic incursions. He imported craftsmen to build some wonderful monuments in Esfahan, his new capital.

Internal dome of new Friday Mosque

The New Friday Mosque used the same dome over a cube as Shapur and Adashir in their Sassanian palaces and as the Zoroastrians before that. For the Zoroastrians, the cube represented the earth, the dome represented the sky and there was always a pool of water before the entrance. Persia thus modified the plain Arabic mosque and gave it architectural grandeur, incorporating minarets to balance the mass of the high outer dome. The New Mosque has an inner dome 30M across and the outer dome rises 57M covered in the trademark turquoise tiles. The inside dome has a marvelous decoration of tiles and acts as a reverberation membrane for a mullah who stands under its apex to project his voice to the furtherest corners of the open mosque square beyond the cube. When we visited, the outdoor part of the mosque was being covered with shade-cloth to protect the congregation. A young mullah took us aside and answered questions about himself and his religion.

Ladies Mosque with the peacock's tail of light

The Ladies Mosque, built for the women of his court and not open to the public of the time, is even more jaw-droppingly exquisite. It was given to the Shah’s respected father-in-law, who developed a theological school there.

Opposite the enormous Imam Square, from which the mosques are entered, is a gorgeous formal reception pavillion and gardens, called the many-pillared. A wide reflecting pool, perhaps 100M long, leads up through a shady and extensive garden of trees of various textures to a pavillion where the Shah sat to receive his guests. As we have seen the fashion, 20 dressed tree trunks became pillars, perhaps 20M high, to support a wide and deep flat roof – an impressive verandah. The royal area had been extensively decorated with mirror-work, now destroyed. Behind the façade is a large reception room, painted with 17^th C frescoes in brilliant colours. These had been covered over with plaster later in the same century to protect them f

Shah Abbass reception hall

rom marauding and iconoclastic Afghans, and were only rediscovered by accident 50 years ago. The frescoes are a cross between Italian renaissance and Persian minaturist styles, where Italian idioms of individual personalities and perspective are married with exquisite detail of costume and colour. The Persians developed a new way of painting that gave them several days to work on a section of damp plaster compared to the Italians who had to work very quickly and therefore more impressionistically. Blue, black, white, grey, red & white and orange horses gallop across a field with the Shah leading the charge in a famous battle.

The Shah's renaissance battle

On the other wall, the court of Shah Abbas I is shown in its power and decadence, whereas his son’s court, receiving a supplication from Humayun (a Mughal Emperor on the run), is shown as formal and correct. The son commissioned all the paintings, of course. Below these grand frescoes are small wall paintings of familiar romances and stories in minaturist style.

The Armenian church of Joseph of Arimathea is unprepossessing on the outside but is covered with brightly coloured murals of gospel stories on the inside. The small museum offers gruesome documentation on the genocide of Turkish Armenians and some wonderful illuminated bibles in Armenian script. On the other side of the river the 2000 or so remaining Jews use a private house as their synagoue although one old synagogue we visited still had services every morning followed by breakfast. The rabbi and the Armenian priest divide their time with Tehran where they represent their minority in parliament. Underneath the arches of Shah Abbas’s bridge is cool and has good acoustics. They are a gathering place for reading or contemplation, family picnics and for singers, such as the several men, young and old, who sang for their and our pleasure this morning. A lovely city, but dependent on snow-melt and good water management and therefore fragile in the face of climate change. The Esfahanis are without any water in their river this summer for the first time ever because it has been siphoned off upstream to send to Yazd and to service two large steel mills. Without water, this city of gardens and fountains will die.

Shiraz and Persepolis

Tomb of Hafez

Shiraz, city of roses and poets, was reached after a long drive across salt lakes and over moderate mountains, all semi-desert peopled by nomads and occasional oases. The average temperature was 5 deg cooler 2500 years ago and Alexander’s troops had to find their way through forest in this area. So a Sassanian prince’s hunting lodge in the middle of a bare plain at Sarvestan on the way would have made more sense then. Shiraz had few roses in bloom but truly loves its poets. A garden and pavilion dedicated to a lyrical mystic poet, Hafez, in Shiraz was crowded by people of all ages coming to pay their respects and touch his tomb.
A middle-aged lady was propped up against a pillar reading a volume of his works, totally oblivious to the normal mayhem going on around her. As always, lots of kids of various ages doing their thing, mums and dads looking after them and all the latest fashions on display.

Photo shoot

Later we visited an orangerie with a mirrored pavilion with two young women in startling red or blue tribal gear having a photo-shoot

Persepolis, near Shiraz, is a knock out. Darius set out to shock and awe the tributary kingdoms by the grand, enormously high entrance gateway on a huge terrace accessed up symmetrical flights of shallow stairs. The flat ceiling of the entrance hall was held up by carved bulls on top of 20M pillars, the whole (originally) painted in brilliant colours. One Stanley of the New York Herald left his name there in 1870. Round to the hall of 100 pillars, where skeletal stone windows and doors are set in long-vanished mud walls, originally also about 20M. Then to an antechamber in front of where the great King of Kings, Darius, Xerxes or Ataxerxes sat on the next level approached up further symmetrical shallow flights of stairs.

Persepolis gate

The walls of the stairs carry bas-reliefs of the 28 subject nations, each in distinctive caps and clothing and bearing gifts of their local specialty: metal, cloth, food or animals. The king sits enthroned in another hall of enormous height, this time with fluted columns. the rock tombs of three Kings are a short distance away, the facades in the overall shape of a cross. The cave entrance of each is carved to represent the palace; above that level, the 28 nations support the king (and kingdom) under the symbol of Ahura Mazda. Below the palace, the arm of the cross is blank – the nothingness of the pit. Cyrus is buried elsewhere. The whole impression is of the recruitment and organisation of massive resources to emphasise imperial grandeur.

Darius receiving his tributed

Persepolis was connected by fast pony express to all parts of the empire. Darius used the site for ceremonial gatherings, dividing his time with Susa, near Ctesiphon and Basra in Mesopotamia, and with Ecbatana, modern Hamdan. Each transfer is about 500km. In 330 BC, Alexander and his hoplites with their superior spears and shields had sliced through the 10,000 Immortals (bodyguard) and the many other troops to defeat the Sassanian Empire. In a drunken orgy, the treasury was looted and the palace burnt down. The ceiling fell in and the site became covered with earth, protecting the artifacts until they were excavated in the 1939’s.

The Sassanians had their origin with Ardashir in the third century AD. He defeated the Parthians after declaring an independent state based on a well defended hilltop palace & fort. Once he felt safe, he built a palace on the plain near permanent water near what is now Ferozeabad. There, the builders constructed the first dome – double skinned at that - on a square building for the very first time, using kiln dried bricks. The inside parabolic dome had a diameter of 20M and the outer dome started further out and rose at a shallower angle to join the inner dome towards a center aperture. Two of the three domes still stand. His son, Shapur the Great defeated the Roman Governor of Syria, Philip the Arab and defeated and captured the Roman Emperor Valerian as celebrated on rock carvings at Bishapur.

Shapur's Roman built city

Shapur and the Roman emperors

There Shapur built his own palace and city with an enormous dome of about 28M diameter, supported on a Greek Cross. The city was built by captured Roman soldiers, now slaves and included the only mosaics in the Sassanian tradition, now carted off to the Louvre. When the Arabs arrived in the 7^th C, they adapted signal high towers, such as Ardashir’s 35M example, as minarets for the muezzin to call for prayers.

Potted Persian History

We are only just getting to grips with the wealth of history in this crossroads of civilization. As much for our own use as to clarify some dynastic terms, the following is a primer in the stuff we are looking at.

Much of Persia is a highish plateau, separated to the southwest from the low lands of Mesopotamia (now Iraq) by the high Zagros Mountains. To the north the Alborz range guards the approaches to the Caspian. The ancient trading routes from central Asia and China enter Persia in the far northeast and travel along the northern edge of a great desert to what is now Tehran (previously Ra’ay). The merchandise then traveled down to Mesopotamia to markets at Baghdad or Damascus and Aleppo in what is now Syria. Afghanistan’s mountains separate the great desert in the east of Persia from the Indus valley except in the southeast where semi desert gives access to Pakistan. Historically, these routes were also the routes of invasion by the Mongols or Turks from central Asia or the Arabs from the south. Afghanistan and the Indus valley have, at various times been the route of invasion for Persians into India, of Indians into Persia and of Afghani kingdoms to dominate both sides.

Copy of Archaemenid carpet

The Achaemenian Dynasty (7thC – 330’sBC) really got going with Cyrus II who united the tribal leaders on the Persian plateau and invented the idea of empire with diverse cultures all paying tribute to a central authority.

An immortal guard

Capital from Persepolis

He was followed by Darius who installed many qanats and built a regional bureaucracy but lost a battle at Marathon in Greece in 490BC. Ten years later, his son, Xerxes, built a bridge of boats across the Hellespont to subdue recalcitrant Athens and Sparta with a massive army. He retreated with a bloody nose from Thermopylae, Salamis and Platea and set up the successful challenge from Alexander in 333BC. More when we get to Persepolis.

After Alexander died, Persia came under his general Selucius, whose dynasty was followed after some time by the Parthians. Both built in mud brick and there is little left to see, although the Parthians blocked Roman expansion to the East.

Sassanian brickwork & squinches

Sassaian Dome

The next great dynasty was the Sassanians, beginning with Ardashir (224 AD). Their great Kings expanded their own Empire to include the Eastern Mediterranean from Egypt to Turkey by 628 AD. The Sassanian and Roman Empires fought each other to an exhausted standstill after each overreached in other directions. The repeated arrival of the plague after 541 decimated urban and rural environments, destroying agriculture, the tax base and military recruitment. Nomadic groups were not as susceptible, so when the Arabs organised under the banner of Islam in the 7^th C, they overran the settlements of Mesopotamia, Syria, Turkey and Persia under the early Umayyad Caliphs of Damascus. The Persian capital of Ctesiphon near Basra was captured in 637, initiating the capture and Islamicisation of Persia.

The Sunni Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad had a strong power base in eastern Persia, from whom they learned the arts of governing a diverse empire that stretched from Tashkent to Cordoba. By the tenth century, three separate Caliphates had developed in Andalucía, Egypt and Bukhara, where the Saminid dynasty of Khorasan and the subsequent Ghaznavid and Seljuc dynasties built a wonderful education system. Sufism was often the preferred version of Islam in Eastern Persia. They produced many of the intellectual giants of the Islamic period. However, the Mongol invasion in the 13^th C destroyed many of the great cities and their intellectual treasures.

Prince's pleasure garden

New Friday Mosque Esfahan

The Safavid Empire, officially Shia, began the 16^th C. Their greatest ruler, Shah Abbas, created a wonderful capital at Isfahan, competing with the contemporary Mughal and Ottoman Dynasties at Delhi and Istanbul respectively. Driven onto the back foot by Afghan invaders, Nader Shah defended and then replaced the Safavids in 18^th C. He sought the recovery of the Peacock throne and the two largest diamonds in the world from Delhi and promptly sacked the city when there was a show of reluctance. The Koh-I-nur is now set in the crown of England, the Darya-i-nur is on display in Tehran but the Peacock throne was broken up by soldiers for booty.

The last Shah's feet

More recently, the Qajars weakened Persia over the 19^th C and were replaced in a coup. Reza Khan crowned himself Shah in 1921 but his son, Mohammed Reza Shah, was driven into exile in 1979. Since then Iran has been an Islamic Republic.

Kerman & Rayen

Five hours southeast from Yazd, Kerman is the major city on the way to Pakistan and southern Afghanistan and to the Persian Gulf. Kerman’s hotel is very grand, catering for the merchants and businessmen and tourists. While Kerman is pleasant at 2000M, it is not far from the hottest point on the planet, at 80M below sea level and 70deg on a fine summers day.

Hijabs for sale

The bazaar has tall Baluchis stalking through and small Hazari refugees escaping the violence of Afghanistan. The city is famous for embroidery and a particular carpet design and for pistachios. Just off the main bazaar is an old hammam with separate alcoves for the different trades.

Dulcimer & tambourine

Men in the morning and women in the evening – a fine place to do business or catch up on gossip. We had afternoon tea and shared a hubble-bubble with apple tobacco while musicians played a hammer dulcimer and a drum tambourine and sometimes sang. I’ll try and get a CD of the music that mixed familiar rhythms with the Middle Eastern scale.

The old mud walled city of Rayen and its citadel dates to Sassanian times.

Rayen citadel

The city is there because the rich soil can be watered by qanats and is very productive with various fruits. The high old battlements contained a population of perhaps 3000 in an area perhaps 300M square with a large citadel that housed the governor and his family. The entire population was supposed to cram into the citadel when danger threatened and the outer walls were being breached. The old town was abandoned about 150 years ago and has spread down the slope.

Nearby is a wonderful Persian garden from the late 19^thC. Qanat water flows in a never-ending stream over about twelve cascades set 40 M apart down a gentle slope. The channel is set in an avenue of old cypress trees (symbol of long life) with their roots watered by another continuous flow of water. An ornamental gateway leads the eye to the pavilion at the top, from where the view is stunning. Jagged high mountains of bare rock form the backdrop. All this is surrounded by semi-desert. Families on long distance travel or locals are picnicking beside the streams in the shade of these old trees. Absolutely delightful.

And even more beautifully tiled Friday mosques and shrines. This one, a shrine to a 19thC Sufi leader and poet, has beautiful calligraphy around the entrance. Even more stunning was a tiny cell where a poet meditated for 40 days and nights. The room is decorated in an uncluttered style by beautiful calligraphy capturing his poetry on the plaster

Desert towns and Zoroaster

Yazd is southeast of Tehran about an hour’s flight and on the edge of a desert where it was part of a network of trading routes. Caravanserais and qanats and a spotlessly clean ancient mud brick old town now surrounded by a modernising concrete city. Caravanserais are two-storey motels built around a large courtyard with stables and storerooms below and sleeping quarters and services above in deep arched arcades.

Pistachio fruit

In the open country, watchtowers protect them and a big gate closed at sunset to protect against brigands. Our hotel was a renovated caravanserai. The daytime temperature at Yazd (about 600M altitude) was about 38C, dropping to a pleasant 25 at night with zero humidity. The water supply comes from qanats, underground tunnels dug by hand many centuries ago to bring snow-melt from surrounding mountains. Surface evidence of a qanat is a straight line of giant anthills about 100M apart where shafts have been dug down and then connected by the water channel; the channel descends at a steady 1-2 degrees whatever the surface topography to deliver water to towns with minimal evaporation. While the water is now pumped up for people or agriculture, housewives used to have to descend long flights of stairs to bring up their daily supply of water.

Wind tower above a pavillion

Teahouse courtyard

The old town alleys run between high walls protecting small domestic courtyards, hammams (communal bathhouses), hotels, teahouses and people’s lives from dust and sunshine. Living spaces are set down into the earth to maintain a constant temperature and ventilated by tall wind towers where convection currents generated by rising hot air creates cooling breezes down below. If the moving air is directed over small fountains, the desert air is cooled and moistened.

The isolation of Yazd has made it one of the last populations of Zoroastrians when they were escaping the Islamasization of Iran in the 7^th century or the rampages of the Mongols in the 13^th. They are an ancient monotheistic religion that believed in the sacredness of the Aryan tetrad of fire, earth, water and air.

Sacred fire

They believed in the great God Ahura Mazda with the three central tenets of think honestly, speak truth and do good. Ahura Mazda is in continual conflict with the angel of evil and it is a person’s choice to live a redemptive good life or not. The Christian concept of Satan probably derived from this duality. After death the body becomes unclean and Zoroastrians do not want to contaminate earth by burial, so the corpse was taken to remote Towers of Silence to be devoured by vultures.

Tower of silence from funeral place

Expansion of Yazd and a decline in vulture numbers has meant the bodies now have to be buried in rock-lined graves. We visited the Towers and one of their several sacred flames, kept burning by priests for 1500 years. This was the religion of the Archaemenid Persian Empire that stretched from the Indus to the Aegean, and from Egypt to the Oxus until defeated by Alexander. A group of Persians fled persecution long ago and went to Bombay, where the honesty and business sense of the Parsees made them a very rich group: they now run huge businesses such as Tata.

Yazd people were friendly, although more conservative than Tehranis. As an aside, a number of fashionable women sport plaster on their now-straight noses.

Seventeen days in Iran

Tehran and the Caspian

Tehran is a rapidly modernising metropolis of 12-15 million spread over an increasingly smog-choked valley. The city itself is fairly young, having been settled after the Mongols had razed the older sometime capital nearby of Ra’ay. During the Ottoman period in Turkey, the capital had been at Isfahan for security reasons. So Tehran has lots of museums but no antique monuments. The major timemark is therefore the flight of Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1979 and the subsequent Revolution that brought the Islamic Republic into being. Since then, Tehran has rapidly increased in size. As urbanisation and an educated middle class increases, the streets and freeways struggle to keep up with the increasing number of cars. An embryonic metro system relieves only some of the pressure.

 A very long bus ride took us to the port of Bandar-Anzali on the Caspian Sea by way of Chalus, the nearest point on the Sea as a crow with an oxygen mask might fly from Tehran. The 170 km road winds up a long, steep sided valley to a pass at about 3400M and then winds down the other side just as quickly. Dramatic gorges and precipitous hillsides spectacularly tamed by Irani engineers in 1924 so that Shah Mohammed Pahlavi could reach his seaside villa on the Caspian. We followed a long and slowly snaking string of cars and the occasional bus (no trucks allowed) up the narrow road until a one-way section had been cleared soon after reaching the top. The traffic was heavy because it was the last long weekend of the school holidays and everyone wanted to visit the Caspian. So family parties were picnicing in every conceivable spot on the roadside and beside nearby rushing streams, catered for by numerous teahouses. Hotels and shops and a few high-rise condos now cram the seaside where the Shah and a few wealthy favourites had isolated grand villas. We wondered why we were there.

The seaward side of these massively high mountains are green and rainy in comparison to the dry semi-desert of Tehran. Rice paddies and tea gardens supplement fruit growing. The Caspian is 1000M deep close off shore and shelters the caviar sturgeon. Mountain streams have brook trout and the whole environment is lush with growth. We visited a mountain village, Masuleh, together with about 5000 other (local) tourists, all happy and relaxed. They were more than happy to have their picture taken and to take ours, to welcome us to Iran (most of our tour group is American) and invite us to dance to happy handclaps.

A warm and friendly welcome by a happy people. Women in head-scarves and a huge variety of dress from coloured tunics and tight trousers to full chador in all the colours of the rainbbow, sometimes on one person, with happy kids in tow. The speciality of the village has been forest produce in various forms of preservation including herbal teas, fruit leathers, pomegranite pastes, pickling spices and pickled garlic. People were very ready to engage and we enjoyed ourselves immensely.

 

Then returning through a lower pass up wide valleys where rice paddies gave way to olive tree orchards and then broad acre wheat plantings. At Qazvin we visited a shrine to Hossein, one of the Shia holy men related to Mohammed. The shrine glittered inside from every surface in cut and decorative mirrors, lit by a great golden chandelier and a few other lights. Quite different from the somewhat morbid saints relics in medieval Latin cathedrals, but providing a secure place for the faithful to bring their problems in prayer. The castles of the Assassins were nearby on inaccessible crags, but they ve long since been dispersed by the Mongols.