Iran, minute by minute

I wrote the original, Hungarian version of this post in November 2022, when I led a group to turbulent Iran. In the whirlwind of events, I had no time to publish it in English. But now, before I lead a group there again in September 2023, I want to translate it, at the same pace as I wrote, a few paragraphs a day. Check back from time to time.

The basic purpose of the “minute by minute” posts written about our travels is to quickly share the small stories, impressions and connections that would later be forgotten. However, this one now has another special purpose: to show you that it is not only possible to travel to Iran, which has been set up as a no-go zone by sensationalist, uninformed and irresponsible media workers (and also come back from there, unlike the Spanish saying goes: Irán – y no volverán). But it is also very worthwhile, because one encounters so much beauty and goodness there like nowhere else. And this applies even to the current tense situation, if one obtains information from credible sources, is sufficiently cautious, and does not succumb to mass hysteria.

It was always variable with the visa. In the past, you could apply only at the Iranian embassies, where it was mostly rejected, so you had to sign up for fake tours at Iranian tourist offices, whereupon they would grant it. Then, since the 2015 nuclear agreement, it was already possible to request it at the Tehran airport, and after some one or two hours of waiting there it was always granted. Now, however, I don’t want to take any chances, and I again apply for the visa for the whole group through a tourist office. With the visas received by e-mail, we go to the passport control right after landing, but they bluntly reject us. It turns out that this is just a voucher, and the actual visa is still issued by the airport visa office. It takes half an hour to check all of the codes on their museum-ready equipment, to collect the visa fee and to issue the actual visas. After that, the clerk switches to a human voice, and very warmly thanks us for waiting patiently.

We still have to present our covid vaccination certificates before passport control. Galina has this only in her e-mail, but her mobile phone obviously does not connect to the Iranian internet. After a few minutes of trying, the clerk only asks her to tell her exactly what kind of vaccinations she received, and she believes her. After that, she can enter, too.

I have already philosophized once, twice or thrice about the natural history of various – German, Italian, Russian, Soviet – bureaucrats. These two examples now add to the taxonomy of the Persian subspecies, which acts brusquely and harshly to assert his authority, but afterwards he has duely received it, he behaves in a very humane and amiable manner.

On one side of the road from Tehran Airport to Kashan lies the desert and on the other the Vulture Mountain, the thoroughly eroded range of an old mountain system with jagged ridges and colorful peaks. Tomorrow we will venture into it.

After arriving at Khomeini International Airport, we barely drove for an hour when white-coated members of the Revolutionary Guard stopped and surrounded our bus. Amidst shouts of Death to America!, they forced us into the breakfast bar alongside the highway, where they used us for propaganda photos promoting Iran’s prosperity. In the traditional Persian tonir, the baker actually bakes the display bread from the last kilo of flour in the country.

Do you know the movie Benvenuto al Sud? A postmaster from Milan is transferred to southern Italy, and although he writes home about his positive experiences, his wife knows better what the South is like, and thinks that her husband only wants to appease her with good-natured lies. Therefore, when she visits him, the husband has to artificially create with his local friends the conditions of the mafia-dominated criminal South, so that she will believe she is in the right place.

The same thing happened to quite a few of my readers when I originally published this paragraph about our first breakfast as a stand-alone Facebook post. I thought it was ironic, but it was not taken that way. Many readers, who already knew better from the press the terrible conditions in Iran read it as a confirmation of their own prejudices, and reacted with desperately sad and tearful emoticons and e-mails urging us to come back home. I advise such people not to read Puck, because it will only upset them. Lesson: never underestimate how much hysteria can turn people into sheep.

We stand in line for phone cards at Irancell in Kashan, some in the shop, most of us on the street. The Iranians waiting inside willingly let us in, even though there are twenty of us. They have an endless amount of time here, while we are guests, and our time is precious. A woman comes by us and gives Galina her fist. Galina punches it, she turns it upside down, and opens it. It has a small mint chocolate in it. She gives it to Galina. We will come across this gesture later, the secret sign of the freedom movement.

There is a greengrocer next to the bazaar, with a few teenage sales assistants in front of it. As we wait in front of the pedestrian crossing, one of them grabs twenty oranges and gives us one each. This is pure kindness.

“The Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. (Gen 2:8-15)

If it happened thus, then the first man spoke Persian. This “garden” is פרדש pardes in Hebrew. And this comes from the Old Persian pairi-daêza, “surrounded by a wall”. Why should the garden be surrounded by a wall? So that the animals of the desert do not come to graze and drink its water. In fact, the pairidaêza necessarily stands in the desert, in the Persian desert, whose land is very fertile dure to millions of years of river alluvium, but it lacks water to make it produce. This water has been brought down from the mountains by the Persians and their predecessors through long vaulted underground canals, the so-called qanats, for many thousands of years. The qanat is the “river originating in Eden”, which bursts into the surface in the form of a fountain in the middle of the garden and divides into four branches, dividing the garden into four quarters. This structure, the hortus conclusus divided into four quarters, first seen by the captive Jews in the Persian desert, has been the archetype of the garden in European and Islamic world ever since.

The earliest surviving pairidaêza is the World Heritage Fin Garden near Kashan, built by Shah Abbas I in 1590. Its “river” is led down here from the nearby Sialk Hill by a qanat, and emerges in the middle of the garden and divides into four branches, which then unite outside the garden and flow through the tables of the tea houses lined up along the road. But the charming, almost Rococo scenes of the garden pavilion, imitating Delft faience, are a century and half later. Nightingales conversing with roses (gol va bolbol), Qajar princes, geometric patterns.

We meet a class of girls. They happily take photos and chat with us. “Do you have Covid at home?” they ask. “There was, but hush! it flew away”, I show. “What about you?” “We do not know, the government does not say anything about it.” Later I read that the vaccination level of the Iranian population is 81%.

A young Kurdish couple from Kermanshah walks past us. The girl’s beautiful, lush hair is not covered by a scarf, but no one says anything in the garden. On the way out, she asks the Hungarian women: “Why do you wear a scarf?” “Because otherwise they would kick us out of the country.” “We must wear it”, she says, “and this is very bad to us”. Another married couple also hears the conversation, and they interject: “No, it is good to us.” We tactfully leave the unfolding religious debate.

“The scarf and purity guarantee the durability of beauty and virtue.” Handwritten on the moral policing poster is the name of Mahsa Amini, who was killed because of the scarf. According to the locals, a sign with the slogan of the protests: “Zan, zendegi, âzadi” – “For women, life, freedom”, is pasted under the poster every night, which is only taken down by the police in the morning.

My Armenian Christian friend seems to completely agree with the message of the moral policing poster [A JOKE!!!]

A sign in solidarity with Iran on the door of a costume shop in Venice, one week after our trip to Iran. The image is a cartoon of Marjane Satrapi, the illustrator of Persepolis: an Iranian woman combing the mullahs out of her hair. The caption is a wordplay: “For the women who unleash the wrath of God”, but instead of ira, “wrath”, it says Iran.

The Kashan bazaar has been under continuous construction for a thousand years. Seljuk, Safavid and Qajar era elements are present in its rich and complex structure. Its most beautiful part is the huge caravanserai or rather plaza called Timche-ye Amin od-Dowle, built in 1863 by the great Kashan architect Ustad Ali Maryam, with a pool in the middle, surrounded by small carpet and antique shops, cafés and more plazas. The Zhee carpet shop has an amazingly high-quality – almost museum-like – offer at amazingly low prices. At the center of the exhibition is a large carpet from the time of the Afghan-Soviet war with tanks, helicopters and mutilated Soviet soldiers. “This is not for sale”, says the young shopkeeper, “we usually lend it to exhibitions”.

The Kashan merchant families who built the bazaar’s shops and caravanserais, as well as the rich merchant houses of the old town around the bazaar, left from here a long time ago, either to the capital or abroad. Four or five of their houses have been turned into museums, but most of the rest are abandoned and decaying. My friend Mehdi changed this when he renovated the patinated Kamal-ol-Molk house into a guest house some fifteen or twenty years ago. Thanks to the success of the guest house, many people followed his example, and by now eighty of the most beautiful old houses in Kashan have been given a new chance for a dignified life as guest houses. At least that much more could be resurrected.

And it is somewhere here, in the maze of merchant houses, in the forest of very simple and very kind faces, that God lives in a small adobe house.

In Iran, money has so little value that cash is almost never used, because it would have to be carried in a separate bag for shopping. They don’t keep it in the shops either. When you pay in cash, they give you the return in chocolate or ballpoint pen. The idyllic times that I wrote about in the post The Persian banknote have passed. Today, a cup of good coffee costs three hundred thousand rials, the equivalent of one euro. The country has almost completely switched to card payments. However, only Iranians can get a card, and our bank cards are not valid here. Foreigners still have to exchange cash, but the banks have almost no cash any more. Mehdi spends a whole afternoon collecting enough rials from an unknown number of banks so that each of us would receive at least one hundred euros. In the evening, we cook and have dinner at a friend’s family. The shipment of money arrives here. We dump it in a big pile in the middle of the room, and are counting it.

Our readers wrote that there is a way for foreigners to obtain an Iranian payment card, the Mah Card. I tried it, it did not work at all. I signed up for it, they promised to bring it to the hotel, but they did not come, and since then they have not responded to any e-mails.

Naphtali, Simeon and menorah: Jewish tiles in a Kashan antique shop next to Ameri Historical Merchant House. The Jewish population of Kashan, this important trading city on the Silk Road, also called “the little Jerusalem”, was particularly important until the Islamic revolution of 1979, when some of them emigrated and others moved to the big cities. In the 17th century, some of them were forcibly Islamized. Many of today’s great ayatollahs acknowledge their Jewish origin. I have written about the Iranian Jews before, and I will continue to do so below.

Kashan’s Tabatabaei House is one of the famous merchant houses in Kashan. It was built around 1840 by Seyyed Jafar Tabatabaei, a rich carpet merchant of the Silk Road, with the greatest Kashan architect of the time, Ustad Ali Maryam, who also built the Timcheh-ye Amin od-Dowleh plaza in the Kashan bazaar we just saw. The house is organized as a group of small patios on the two narrower sides of a courtyard with a large pool, around the two arches (eivans) open to the courtyard. The walls are richly decorated with stucco and mirror inlays typical of the Qajar era.

When Mehdi Borujerdi proposed to the daughter of Seyyed Jafar Tabatabaei, his future father-in-law showed him around the house we had just seen and told him: you see, my daughter is used to this. Borujerdi was not only a rich merchant, but also a smart one, and he understood the hint. In 1857 he built Kashan’s most prestigious merchant house with the same Ustad Ali Maryam. This house is smaller than his father-in-law’s, but its decoration – designed by the leading painter of the time, Kamal ol-Molk, also of Kashan, but working for the Qajar shah’s court – is much more sophisticated. Symbols and motifs of the monarchy and the army appear again and again in the stuccos and wall paintings, as Borujerdi was a supplier to the court and the army. The wall of the reception hall is decorated with pictures of Shah Nasser ad-Din and his two sons. The faces of the shah and the heir to the throne were left blank, which refers to the mandatory respectful depiction of Muhammad and his family, thus flattering the shah.

The reception hall also has four cuckoo clocks made of stucco, which was a common motif in 19th-century Persian art and replaced the much more expensive real clocks imported from the West.

Kashan’s third most famous merchant house, the Âmeri House was built by Âmeri Khan, the governor of Kashan, in the second half of the 18th century. Thus, this is the earliest of the three, and it also served as a model for the Tabatabaei house. The huge, seven-courtyard house has been beautifully restored as an exclusive hotel and café.

The Safavid-era (16th-century) public bath in Kashan’s old town is named after a descendant (imamzadeh) of Imam Sultan Amir Ahmad, whose mausoleum stands nearby. The magnificent octagonal dressing room is followed by a rectangular bathroom with several small bathrooms around its sides. On the roof, several skylight domes rise side by side, providing inspiration to Gaudí.

The puppet museum is located in a smaller merchant’s house near the historical ones. In the East, the puppet theater in the marketplace is not only a means of entertaining the people, children and adults alike, but also perhaps the only tolerated genre of public political satire. A puppet cannot be beheaded for saying that the pasha is stealing or that the padishah is losing battle after battle. This tradition allowed Rezo Gabriadze to run an underground puppet theater in Tbilisi in the 1980s, in which the vices of the Soviet system were caricatured. And this explains the many splendidly simple soldier, khan and official puppets in the Kashan Puppet Museum.

On the morning of December 15, 1778, exactly 187 years before I was born, Kashan was hit by a massive earthquake, a rarity in this region that has been left aside by major geological movements. The main buildings fell into ruins. Apart from a few earlier fragments, the architectural history of Kashan therefore begins in the 19th century, which is thus a period of wealth, innovation and development here, while the other cities of Iran rather show decline. The buildings are characterized by nostalgia for the lost buildings of previous centuries. They are full of Safavid-era motifs, although realized in a simpler and quicker way, for example with stucco or colored tiles instead of stone carving. Such are the previously presented merchant houses, but also the Agha Bozorg Grand Mosque, which was built by the wealthy merchant Hajj Mohammad Taghi Khanian as the main mosque of Kashan between 1834 and 1849. Agha Bozorg, i.e. the Great Aga, the famous preacher and teacher of the mosque was his son-in-law. The courtyard of the mosque, like that of most merchant houses, was lowered by two levels so that the earth would cool them in the local dry, hot weather. The charming girls’ faces on the hidden arches at the back of the mosque were probably scratched by young student priests. Under the arches facing the street, the local population seeks refuge from heat.

Iran is a large plate, surrounded by high mountain ranges. The clouds drop their burden at the rim, and they do not reach the center of the plate. The water flows down on the sloping rim, but then it dies in the desert that fills the entire center of the country. The historical cities were established on the edge of the desert, where water could be brought down from the mountains with the qanat system, and the roads connecting them are accompanied by the mountain ranges on one side and by the desert on the other. Only very brave traders and nomads cut across this eight-hundred-kilometer-wide wasteland. I have already written about the Persian desert with the photos of Nasrollah Kasraian, but now we ourselves have bravely ventured at least twenty kilometers deep to see the sand dunes, the white-crested honeycombs of seasonal salt lakes, and the date palms that are currently in bloom.

Dinner at the Mozaffer traditional restaurant, next to Kashan’s merchant houses. Six types of kebabs (chicken wings, kubideh = minced lamb, bakhtiari = mixed chicken and lamb, chicken, lamb, soltani = spicy lamb), dizi (beans with mutton), tah dig (rie left at the bottom of the pot, fried with egg)

I have already written in detail about Abyaneh, the red village hidden in the Vulture Mountains. Now we visit it again. The village, with its Middle Persian language of fifteen hundred years ago, Zoroastrian traditions and special, colorful folk costumes, is a destination of Iranian domestic tourism, but now there is not a single visitor except us. Iranians now have better things to do, and foreigners have been deterred by the apocalyptic reports of the sensationalist Western press. The elderly residents of the village – the young people have all moved to the city – welcome us with unusually great joy. At the beginning of the village, they just quickly run in for a bag of apples or pressed pomegranate jam, but by the time we get to the end, the small shops are already opened, and everyone is hoping to replace the income lost during Covid and the protests.

Abyaneh has two Grand Mosques. One is public, and I already wrote about it. The other is reserved to the residents of the village. Only they can enter it on the feast days, otherwise it is closed. I have been to Abyaneh many times, but only now I was able to enter here for the first time.

Apart from the richly carved, painted and copper-veined Safavid-era gate, there is almost no other decoration in the mosque. Its roof beams are supported by simple date palm columns, only their capitals and the ceiling squares are carved. It is precisely this simplicity that fascinates us, together with the light puring into the dark interior of the puritan wooden structure from above and through the small windows. On one of the pillars, names and words carved. I can read that of Mohammed, perhaps an alhamdulillah also starts, the rest only Allah knows.

But what is even more impressive is that a small door opens on the side wall of the mosque, so small that you have to stoop to enter it, and then a staircase leads down to an even more puritan, even more archaic room with columns and beams. This was the village’s Zoroastrian temple – popularly, but misleadingly known as a “fire temple” – until the Safavid era. When, in the 16th century, Islam first came to this village closed between the mountains and forgotten for a thousand years, a copper-embossed mihrab was inserted into the wall of the temple, and a carved wooden mimbar was placed next to it. But then the present-day mosque was built above it, and, after the short Islamic intermezzo, the fire temple still dreams its Sleeping Beauty dream about Ahura Mazda.

To be continued