The first day in the school

…in Persia, Mazandaran province near the Caspian Sea. Photos by Hamed Khurshidi.







…and in a girl’s school in Tehran. Photos by Ali Rafiei.

Children of the paradise

The Behesht-e Zahra, to the south of Tehran, is perhaps the largest among the cemeteries of Iran. It got its name – Zahra’s paradise – after Fatima, fourth daughter of Mohammad and wife of the holy caliph of the Shiites Ali, as she is called az-Zahra, “the Shining”. Here lay some of the main leaders of the Islamic Republic, beginning with Ayatollah Khomeini who on his return to Iran after the revolution delivered his historical speech on 1 February 1979 in this cemetery. Here lay many of the one million Iranian soldiers who fell in the eight years old Iraq-Iranian war. And here lay also the twenty-six years old Neda, shot dead a year ago on 20 June during the manifestations in Tehran. The cemetery is daily visited by several people from the sixteen million inhabitants of Tehran.

A multilane highway leads from the city to the cemetery. Along the highway, in summer and in winter, there stand the little flower sellers called “the children of the paradise”, hoping they would succeed in selling till night for 5000 tomans (about 3 USD) all the flower they purchased on the market in the dawn for  3000 tomans (about 2 USD). The difference means the livelihood of whole families here, in the poorest neighborhoods of Tehran.

Nevertheless, Mansure Motamedi on her photo series made on the flower sellers does not highlight the obvious misery, but rather the beauty and joy which permeates even the hard lives of these children. Similarly to the beautiful film by Majid Majidi, which also presents the children living in the poor southern neighborhoods of Tehran, and even with its title reminds the little flower sellers of Zahra’s paradise: The children of heaven.

Los Niños del Paraíso

Behesht-e Zahra, al sur de Teherán, es seguramente el mayor cementerio de Irán. Toma su nombre —Paraíso de Zahra— de Fátima, cuarta hija de Mahoma y esposa del santo califa de los shiíes, Alí, pues a ella se la conocía por az-Zahra, «la luminosa». Aquí yacen algunos de los principales líderes de la República Islámica, empezando por el Ayatolá Jomeini, quien al volver a Irán después de la Revolución pronunció en este cementerio su histórico discurso del 1 de febrero de 1979. Yacen aquí muchos de los soldados iraníes que —hasta en número de un millón— murieron en la guerra Iraq-Irán, que duró ocho años. Y también descansa en esta tierra Neda, la mujer de veintiséis años asesinada el pasado verano, el 20 de junio, durante las manifestaciones en Teherán. Cada día, mucha gente, de los dieciséis millones de habitantes que tiene la capital, encuentra algún motivo para acercarse hasta el cementerio.

Una autopista de varios carriles lleva de la ciudad al cementerio. En todo su recorrido, sea verano o invierno, puede verse a los pequeños vendedores de flores, a quienes llaman «los niños del paraíso»,  intentando vender hasta la noche, por 5000 tomans (unos 3 dólares), todas las flores que compraron al amanecer en el mercado por 3000 tomans (unos 2 dólares). Aquí, en los barrios más pobres de Teherán, esta diferencia significa el sustento de familias enteras.

Con todo, Mansure Motamedi en su colección de fotos de estos vendedores de flores no subraya la obvia miseria, sino que observa la belleza y la alegría que empapa la dureza alrededor de los niños. Una visión similar se encuentra en el hermoso film de Majid Majidi sobre la vida de los niños pobres en los barrios al sur de Teherán y cuyo título recuerda a los pequeños vendedores de flores del paraíso de Zahra: The children of heaven.

The dawn gives news

The sewer in the background is just like the thousand other ones that run down from the Darband through the rich northern suburbs of Tehran to the poor southern suburbs of Tehran, covering a level difference of a thousand meters and a thousand years, flushing the city of twelve million inhabitants with the fresh spring-water of the mountains, and supplying an unforgettable background and pitch-note to such marvelous films like the Bachehâ-ye âseman (Children of the Sky) by Majid Majidi, or Tehrân sâ'at-e haft sobh (Tehran, seven in the morning) by Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The few that we can see of the houses also permits to localize it somewhere in the southern part of the city, in one of the alleys of the former southern center developed by the Shah and since then swallowed by the bazaar, from the low windows suitable both to sale and to fostering neighborhood life, through the sky-blue door to the emerald green moss growing at the foot of the walls. It is only this burning red rusari that we would not find anywhere.

Recently, in a night requiring lots of Catalan red wine we compared with Wang Wei the songs of different changes of regimes from Eastern Europe to the Spanish Transition. Then we quoted by way of example this poem of one of the greatest modern Persian poets Mehdi Akhavan Sales (1928-1991), set to music by Soheil Nafissi. However, in the roll of the video below in vain we look for the name of Sales. Perhaps he was omitted by way of precaution. Sales – ثالث Saless, as one of the best Tehran bookshops rebelliously calls itself (in the quoted post a bit above the portrait of Lőrinc Szabó) – under the Shah’s rule wrote poems expressing the anxiety of the period (to the Zemestan ast, It’s Winter we will dedicate a separate post), and in the thereafter following times ones similar to the Dawn. To this he owes the summary judgment of today’s official Iranian history of literature: “After 1979 his literary activity shows decline.” After the hastily prepared night translation of the post quoted above, now we want to offer a more reasoned one, so that everyone might decide for himself whether it is really a decline (and if yes, then what kind of peaks exist in Persian poetry), and everyone could foretell what it means when such a poem is set to music, sold on a successful CD and broadcasted in Iranian internet radios.

شهاب‌ها و شب‌ها

Shahâbhâ va shabhâ

Comets and nights

Persian poetry is made so beautiful and untranslatable by its preference to exploit the assonance of sounds and the thereby established accidental relations of words. Who would ever think that night and comet, darkness and light are in such a close relationship to each other: shab and shahâb. This constitutes one of the basic motifs of the poem, the thread of sounds “sh” running through it and linking darkness and light, parallel to which runs that of the adjectives and metaphors beginning with “r”.

از ظلمت رمیده خبر می‌دهد سحر
شب رفت و با سپیده خبر می‌دهد سحر
از اختر شبان رمه شب رمید و رفت
از رفته و رمیده خبر می‌دهد سحر

Az zolmat-e ramide khabar midehad sahar
shab raft o bâ sepide khabar midehad sahar
az akhtar-e shabân rame-ye shab ramid o raft
az rafte o ramide khabar midehad sahar

Of the darkness scared away gives news the dawn the night has gone and with the daybreak gives news the dawn the flock of the night was scared away from the star of the shepherd and has gone of the scared away and the gone gives news the dawn

The quatrains with rhyme scheme AABA or CABA – where A is not just a simple rhyme, but rather the magic repetition of some words throughout the poetry – continue the tradition of medieval Persian rubaiyyat, like the quatrains of Omar Khayyam. Ramidan, scare away, raftan, go (away), rame, flock (related to German and English Ram and ram) – these are the r-columns of this quatrain, resonating with the words akhtar, star (a kin to Latin aster), khabar, news, and of course sahar, dawn, an Arabic word related to the Hebrew Zohar. Sepide, daybreak (which is also a common woman’s name) comes from sefid, white, which, contrasted to the reds of the following strophes, adds further shades to the interplay of darkness and light.

The adjectives scared away and gone in the first three verses refer to the night and its “flock”, but the last verse, by taking them from their context, bears a strong reference to those scared away and gone due to the night. This adumbration, so familiar to the Eastern European reader, is a much liked instrument of Persian poetry.

The “star of the shepherd” is a strange image, but only until we learn that it is also based on verbal consonances. In the term akhtar-e shabân the shabân is an archaic, poetic plural for shab, night, so at first sight it sounds like “star of the nights”. However, shabân also means “shepherd” (this is where Hungarian “csobán” comes from), and the second part of the verse already alludes to this meaning with the word flock, offering such a mythical metaphor for the morning star like the Hungarian poet Ágnes Gergely who also calls it “shepherd of old flocks” in one of her poems.

زنگار خورد جوشن شب را به نوشخند
از تیغ آبدیده خبر می‌دهد سحر
باز از حریق بیشه خاکسترین فلق
آتش به جان خریده خبر می‌دهد سحر

Zangâr khord joshan-e shab-râ bâ nushkhand
az tiq-e âbdide khabar midehad sahar
bâz az hariq-e bishe-ye khâkestarin falaq
âtash be jân kharide khabar midehad sahar

Rust ate the shield of night with a smile of tempered blades gives news the dawn from the grove of the gray morning set to fire brings fire to the soul the news-bringing dawn

In the 80s we Eastern Europeans also learned how rust can eat the shield of the night. However, at that time it was not advisable to speak about tempered blades. In fact, upon a closer view this poem does not speak about them either. Tiq means first of all ray, and only in a second meaning blade or sword. Tiq-e aqtân for example means the rays of the dawn. Thus also the above compound tiq-e âbdide can mean âb-dide, “water-seen” rays, like those of the rising sun reflected on the surface of the water. This would also fit to this poem, nobody can utter a word. However, a much more accepted meaning of this compound is water-seen blade, that is tempered steel sword, and the fact that nobody uttered a word about this either shows how much the rust has already eaten the shield of the night.

از غمز و ناز و انجم و از رمز و راز شب
از دیده و شنیده خبر می‌دهد سحر
بس شد شهید پرده شبها شهاب‌ها
وان پرده‌ها دریده خبر می‌دهد سحر

Az qamz o nâz o anjâm o az ramz o râz-e shab
az dide o shenide khabar midehad sahar
bas shod shahid-e parde-ye shabhâ shahâbhâ
va ân pardehâ daride khabar midehad sahar

Of the signs, coquetry, secrets and termination of the night the things seen and heard gives news the dawn of the comets fallen before the fall of the shroud of the night who tore that shroud off, gives news the dawn

The pulsation of the short words piling up in the first verse is one of the most beautiful examples of the typical Persian play with sounds in this poem.

آه آن پریده رنگ چه بود و چه شد کزو
رنگش ز رخ پریده خبر می‌دهد سحر
چاووش‌خوان قافله روشنان امید
از ظلمت رمیده خبر می‌دهد سحر

Âh ân paride rang che bud o che shod kazu
rangash ze rokh paride khabar midehad sahar
châvushkhân-e qâfele-ye roshanân omid
az zolmat-e ramide khabar midehad sahar

Oh, what was that pale color, and how could it be that about pale faces gives news the dawn? She’s the leader of the song of the hope-bringing caravan of stars, of the darkness scared away gives news the dawn.

And now, with full knowledge of the text, let us listen a second time to the video.

Comets and nights Of the darkness scared away gives news the dawn the night’s gone and with the daybreak gives news the dawn the flock of the night was scared away          from the star of the shepherd and has gone, of the scared away and the gone gives news the dawn Rust ate the shield of night with a smile of tempered blades gives news the dawn from the grove of the gray morning set to fire brings fire to the soul the news-bringing dawn Of the signs, coquetry, secrets and termination of the night the things seen and heard gives news the dawn of the comets fallen before the fall of the shroud of the night who tore that shroud off, gives news the dawn Oh, what was that pale color, and how could it be that about pale faces gives news the dawn? She’s the leader of the song of the hope-bringing caravan of stars, of the darkness scared away gives news the dawn.

Shahâbhâ va shabhâ Az zolmat-e ramide khabar midehad sahar shab raft o bâ sepide khabar midehad sahar az akhtar-e shabân rame-ye shab ramid o raft az rafte o ramide khabar midehad sahar Zangâr khord joshan-e shab-râ bâ nushkhand az tiq-e âbdide khabar midehad sahar bâz az hariq-e bishe-ye khâkestarin falaq âtash be jân kharide khabar midehad sahar Az qamz o nâz o anjâm o az ramz o râz-e shab az dide o shenide khabar midehad sahar bas shod shahid-e parde-ye shabhâ shahâbhâ va ân pardehâ daride khabar midehad sahar Âh ân paride rang che bud o che shod kazu rangash ze rokh paride khabar midehad sahar châvushkhân-e qâfele-ye roshanân omid az zolmat-e ramide khabar midehad sahar.

Rumi and Bach

It is a strange experience to see that not only our Western world cherishes fantasies on other civilizations, but they also do on us. True, for most of them the culture of the West is already a reality built in their everyday lives that does not leave much room for fantasy. However, there are also some exceptions like for example Persia.

I do not know whether the story I heard as a teenager that Khomeini, when asked about his opinion on the music of Bach and Beethoven answered like “I do not know these gentlemen” is true or not. However, that much is sure that nowadays there is not much possibility to get familiar with them in Iran.

The furnishings of the CD shops in Tehran are elegant, their supply of CDs majestic, and their assistants are entrancingly friendly. They can compete with any Western shop. We willingly spent several hours in them, listening to Persian classical CDs, slurping tea – in the Siyah o Sefid (“Black and White,” because it shares his premises with a movie theater) there was no tea, so we received peach drink in paper box with straw – and talking about the musicians with the assistants who often play some Iranian instrument themselves. The only thing that struck us was the supply of European classical CDs. Not that there were none, because indeed there were some. But that their supply was just as casual as that of Chinese, Arabic or Persian classical music in most European CD shops. Good and bad ones mixed up, randomly selected, and displayed without any internal principle of organization – we are so much accustomed to these uniform principles of organization applied in every European CD shop that their lack surprises us. All this made us suspect that local public knew this music no better than ours knows Chinese, Arab or Persian music. And we suspected it well.

Still at home we had invented that we would take with us some Bach CDs as a gift. Those musics we love the most and we esteem the highest – the solo violin sonatas performed by Grumiaux and the Art of the Fugue by Sokolov – and through which we can show the very best of our culture to those people whose culture had given so much wonderful music to us in the past years. It was peculiar to watch the faces of the people presented with these CDs. Apart from the novelty that the European man gives – as far as we saw, this was surprising to everyone –, they reflected a deep, but reserved reverence, as if they received the works of a great philosopher in deluxe binding, in the original language. They knew that Bach is a great name for a great civilization, but they had no personal link to him. It happened just in the Siyah o Sefid that talking about what makes good music we put one of the CDs in the player, and while Sokolov was playing, we analyzed why the music he was playing was good. The CD was over the half when the assistant – who was by the way very well versed in Persian classical music – got it that this was also music and not just a cultural icon, and that it can be played and analyzed just like his own well known music. That he can have a personal relation to it.

Davood Azad has not yet got it. As a well known Persian lute player and singer and, not least, as a real Sufi, two years ago, in the Year of Rumi he published in honor of his master Rumi his CD The Divan of Rumi and Bach, on which he sings the poems of Rumi accompanying himself on tar, the typical Northern Iranian lute of the shape of a number 8, while the ground is given by some piano works of Bach. This could theoretically result in something interesting, although I have never heard any rearrangement of Bach that added something to the value of the original instead of decreasing it. But the result is unconvincing. The music has a grotesque, comic effect. It is split in a strange way. The singing and the tar are up to the standards of Persian music, although their quality is undoubtedly harmed by the fact that they have to give up the meditative rhythm of Persian music and have to adapt themselves to the bound European rhythm. The piece of Bach, however, sounds as mechanical and primitive as a hurdy-gurdy.


Rumi: Blessings unto you + Bach: Third English Suite, Gavotte I and II (7'40")

Jean Durand writes in his great introductory monograph The art of Persian music (Washington, 1991): “When we do not understand a kind of music, we tend to find it monotonous and repetitive. Western music, in fact, seems very monotonous to many Orientals.” If this is true, then on this CD we can hear with our own ears how it seems to them.

It is a strange feeling to hear Bach in the presentation of a musician who is technically qualified enough for the acoustic reproduction of the score, but does not possess the tradition that could lead him how to perform it. In Europe, by the time one learns to master the piano at this level, he has already acquired – to a great extent without being aware of it – this tradition as well. He knows what this music is about, what its inner dynamic – in Bach, the counterpoint – is that he has to unfold in the performance, and how large room it leaves to him to unfold his own personality. He will have a personal relation to it. This relation can be of many kind, from the subtle, signal-like decorations of Perahia through the rich tones of Schiff to the tensions of Glenn Gould. Even the extreme aloofness of Robert Levin is not identical with the mechanical sound of Azad’s hurdy-gurdy: aloofness is also a relation you can like or dislike. (Nevertheless, I find it peculiar that the Bachakademie of Stuttgart selected exactly his performance for the Complete Works of Bach by Hänssler.)


Murray Perahia, Gavotte I (1'32") and Gavotte II (1'38")

Glenn Gould, Gavotte I (0'50") and Gavotte II (1'09")

Robert Levin, Gavotte I and II (3'48")

András Schiff, Gavotte I and II (3'21")

Ivo Pogorelich, Gavotte I and II (4'31")

The question is why one performs a music he has no relation to. By reading the Persian and Western press of Azad I see that most probably for the same reason which encourages European and American groups to perform – completely misunderstood – Tibetan or Arabic music: because there is a demand for it on the market. Persian blogs write with awe about “our son” who was able to put even Western music into the service of Islam mysticism, while Western esoteric circles listen with awe to the shreds of Oriental music, extremely simplified and forced into the frames of Western rhythm and melody, and played with an etherealized expression by an an enchantingly guru-looking Iranian Sufi. How much simpler and more rewarding is this than what the greatest living tar player Majid Derakhshani does, for example, by establishing in Germany an institution for the dissemination of real Persian music in the Western world, and by performing with such musical accompaniment the poems of Rumi, as in the following recording where he performs together with the greatest living Persian singer Mohammad Reza Shajarian.

Rumi - Shajarian, Derakhshani: Ân jâm-e jân afzâi-râ bar-riz bar jân sâqia!
(Pour that soul-increasing goblet in my soul, cup-bearer!)

Russian first

As Wang Wei discovered the Western borderland of Russian language in Catalonia, so we discovered the Eastern borderland of the same language in Persia.

In Persia one can more or less get by with English. With Persian one can settle more difficult cases as well. But hearts can be really opened only with Russian.

From Tehran through Isfahan to Shiraz we were asked in the most unexpected sites: Po-russki govoritye? (And you speak in Russian too?) Each time they asked it like a child who reveals a secret treasure, a rare and precious stamp, desirous to see the other appreciating it. The positive answer was greeted with a shining smile, and then a long, warm conversation followed in Russian. The people who asked it of us were Armenians and Azeris who are just as numerous in Iran as in the former Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan. The life stories told to us revealed that they have always moved with more or less freedom between the two empires, and the Russian language brought with them from the other side of the border enabled them to rise above the status of their own minority languages, to emphasize their otherness and to proudly display their connections with that large world over the borders.

It is always a peculiar experience to speak in Russian with non-Russians. When speaking in English, German, Italian, Spanish or any other idiom, it always remains clear that this is not my own language. It is a neutral intermediary language that is perhaps a pleasure for the other to hear, and perhaps I too can convincingly use it, but it always remains something extraneous to me. Russian, however, creates fellowship, recalls childhood remembrances, revives the memory of the films, books and jokes widely known in all the bygone empire, evokes the experience of that once common world. It creates such a closeness between a Hungarian and an Armenian in Iran which would not be possible either in English or in Persian. And not only in Iran. I had the same experience when speaking with a Bulgarian professor in Mallorca, a Polish cyclist in San Marino, a Georgian diamond dealer on the Madrid-Brussels flight, or an Uzbek innkeeper in Vienna.

In Tehran we were asked in the eating-house of the market at Hafez Street by a woman vested in black chador at the neighboring table whether we can speak Russian. She related us, by fumbling the words learned in her childhood, that her parents were Azeris from the “other” Azerbaijan over the border, and they sometimes also spoke in Russian at home. In an outburst of joy she ordered for us a dish that does not figure on the menu and is only taken by locals: tah dig, the crunchy crust at the bottom of the pan after rice has been steamed.

In Shiraz the Azeri assistant of the milk bar who was just smugly replying to our questions, was all of a sudden transformed into a human being when we changed the conversation to Russian. He turned out to have worked as a confectioner in both Azerbaijans, the Iranian and the Soviet ones. Azeris are great pastry-cookers. Their capital, Tabriz is full of patisseries that almost equal to those in Vienna, and most sweet-shops are in their hands all over Iran.

In Isfahan the guardian of the Armenian cathedral of Vank warned me that it was forbidden to take photos inside the church. Later, when listening to the strange idiom of our conversation he asked us whether we also understood Russian, and as we turned out to be Hungarians, he immediately recalled some Hungarian acquaintances (“István from the Ikarus bus factory”), after which taking photos was absolutely no problem.

In Tehran, on Sunday morning four Armenian men were talking away the time in the porter’s lodge of the Sarkis Cathedral. We inquired them in Persian about where we could find a Catholic mass. When they found out from where we were, the eldest of them turned the conversation to Russian, and in this language he explained us where the Catholic church was (albeit he turned out to have been misinformed, as he pointed us to the Orthodox chapel of the Greek embassy). The other three men were watching him with deep reverence. He accompanied us quite to the entrance of the church, where he asked me in a low voice about when I had been the last time in Moscow. Some ten years ago, I said. And how is Moscow like? It developed a lot, it grew much more beautiful, I said. Slava Bogu, he said, but he was not able to tell anything else, his voice faltered with sobbing.

However, our most peculiar Russian encounter in Persia was such a beautiful round story that I will have to dedicate a separate post to it in the following days.


In my childhood in Hungary it was considered a sort of resistance not to learn the language of the occupiers. Russian was an obligatory subject from the age of eight or ten until the university degree, but after twelve or fifteen years of studies most people could not tell much more than “Alyosha idyot v kino” (Alyosha goes to movie). My mother, when seating my brothers and sisters to do their homework, always released the slogan: “Russian first!”, knowing well that they would cut it with the best conscience.

I had a different moral problem with Russian. I already at the age of seven loved Russian, the strange letters, the romantic illustrations of the cheap brochures of fables sold in the Gorky bookshop, the world of floppy-eared bear Misha, Cheburashka and Crocodile Gena, but most of all that curious alchemy by which I was able, by coupling foreign words and affixes, to tell the same like in Hungarian but in a different way, which has ever since fascinated me in each language again and again. But am I allowed to learn the language of the invaders in a good faith?

I turned with my doubts to my father who told me that Russian was not only the language of the Soviet army, but that of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as well. With this approval I happily threw myself into the study of Russian. And thanks to this, I have since then discovered that Russian is not only the language of these great authors, but that of small people as well, and not only of Russians but, in an odd way, of many different people from Bulgaria to Beijing and from Poland to Iran, organized into a kind of a community by virtue of this intermediary language. And in this way it is also mine.

Persian Food

Persia therefore came to Wang Wei. And in truth, for whoever has seen the menu of this restaurant in Barcelona, has seen that of all the restaurants of Persia.

Persian kitchen is one of the most majestic, most generous, most refined, most enchanting kitchens of the world. It is rustic like Turkish kitchen, sophisticated like French, spicy like Arabic, regionally diversified like Italian, satisfying like Spanish, and so light that there is nothing comparable to it in all Europe. As a matter of fact, it can only be compared in all respects to Chinese kitchen. This is well known to everybody who has not yet been to Persia and only knows its kitchen from literature, from the menu of the classy Persian restaurants in Western Europe and from cook books. Like us.

Before our travel we lived for months in the spell of Persian kitchen. We dreamed about Persian restaurants, we cooked from Eckel’s Persian cook book (fabulously), and I have memorized the twenty-three pages of Turner’s Persian thematic dictionary on food, dishes and spices.

It was unnecessary.

During the passage over lake Van we questioned with excitement our new friend Peyman about what kind of menu is in store for us at the other shore, in the dining car of the Persian train. He meditated for a while, perhaps in order not to omit anything, and then he told: “Kebab, kebab and kebab.”

For one day in the dining car, it’s all right. But for three weeks in all the available restaurants of a whole country it wore us out.

One of the oddest experiences in Iran is that there are hardly any restaurants. The few existing ones with their pseudo-oriental furnishings apparently address western tourists and local snobs. But even of this kind there are really few, the fewest possible you can imagine. In the most touristic city, Isfahan for example only one, the Bastani restaurant at the corner of the main square. And even these ones serve principally kebab. The desperate tone of the “Eating” sections in the Lonely Planet Iran guide reflects well the seriousness of the case.

Besides – or rather in spite of – the proper restaurants there are also restaurant-like public canteens where the workers and employees of the neighborhood take a quick kebab for lunch (for example the میخک Mikhak, that is Glove on the other corner of the main square of Isfahan, with high prices and tasteless dishes), and in the most popular places of excursion and parks there are some restaurants that are only open on the weekend, that is on Friday. Among these latter – especially in such fashionable places like Darband above Tehran – there are most probably some sophisticated ones as well that are visited by the élite of the city for tasting the authentic Persian kitchen. We have seen such places in the movies. In real life, however, we had no luck to discover them. The menu of the place where we ate on Friday evening clearly attested that the chef is out of practice in the other six days of the week. And of course there was only kebab. The vegetarian Ana from Madrid whom we met in the last day of their travel had lived for three weeks exclusively on cooked rice and mixed salad prepackaged in plastic boxes, and in spite of all my Persian eloquence and the waiter’s Persian benevolence they could not serve her anything else for this last supper either.

Although this situation was quite unexpected, nevertheless it was somehow familiar to us, for – like many other things in Iran – it excited the very vivid feeling as if we flew back to the socialist Hungary of the 70’s and 80’s. I still remember how rare the restaurants and the occasions of going to restaurant were in those years. People took their dinner at home – and moreover so gorgeous dishes that even today cannot be found on any menu, like potatoes seasoned with paprika, boiled shredded marrow or stuffed cabbage –, and in those seldom occasions (principally formal ones like a banquet, a wedding or a funeral) when they happened to find themselves in a restaurant, they too ate the equivalent of kebab as it was proper: Wiener schnitzel or cutlets. Such meat, besides having the high status of festive food, was also the easiest to prepare and the most difficult to spoil. I do not know whether it was the dictatorship and the concomitant withdrawal of people to their family circles, the poverty, or the disappearance of the middle classes that shaped this Budapest out of the city of cafés and restaurants like it was between the two wars; probably all these together, just like in the cities of Iran. I’m really curious to what extent people went to restaurant in Franco’s Spain, for example.

But Socialist experiences also had their benefits. I remember how much routine we picked up in the eighties in the localization of the so-called “little dirties” and “pits”, marketplace eateries and hash-houses. This routine was quite well applicable in Iran (just like some years earlier in pre-boom China), for both the structure and arrangement of these “little dirties” is very similar to those in the Hungary of the eighties. They can be found in the markets, in the small alleys around the large “canteen-restaurants” or in the vaults of the bazaars; they are mostly set up for regular local clients, are never larger than a few square meters, and they only cook one or two dishes, but those are majestic. And not kebab. Most tourists would avoid such suspicious places in fright, but whoever enters is greeted with joy, interrogated with the spontaneousness so characteristic of Persians, and entertained liberally. And just like we did in the eighties, present-day Persian intelligentsia also inquires for such places in a programmatic way. Quite similarly to how Endre Lábass and Ferenc Bodor wrote about the inns of Budapest in those times, the excellent tehranavenue.com regularly reports about recent findings in Tehran.

In Isfahan we have found such a noname small cook-shop with two tables just some steps from the above said Bastani restaurant. They only cooked one single dish, beryân, lamb cut in small pieces then cooked and fried, accompanied with the obligatory fragrant, mint-like green reyhân – it was fabulous. At departure the chef accepted with gratitude my eulogies on the dish, while the old woman waiting for our place enunciated with her pointing finger lifted, like the lesson of a long life: “Iranian food is very good.” Yes, if someone is lucky enough to finally find it.

In Tabriz near hotel Kousar there was a small place where they also sold one single dish: cooked potatoes with boiled eggs that everyone had to break, spice and roll in a thin flat bread himself. It is easy to prepare and it leaves enough room for you to reply the questions of the other guests.

In Tehran under the bazaar there is a secret eating-place for the merchants. It is true that on the south-western main street of the bazaar a small green board advertises the name of a “Restaurant Soleiman” (in Farsi only), but even he who takes notice of it cannot but helplessly stand, as behind the board there is a textile shop. You have to cross the shop, and then cross a second shop as well, opening at the right side of the first one, while at the end of the second one there is a staircase leading downstairs, apparently to some storehouse. But if you even have the courage to go down, then you will find a superb little eating-place downstairs with eight or ten chosen good dish and friendly sellers. We would have not found it if there were not Ahmad, the hawker – “call-in-man” – of the nomad carpet shop who willingly guided us to the green board, where we found him after the dinner patiently waiting for us to buy something of him as well. And in fact, we did.

However, the day is carried by the small hash-house on the vegetable market at the upper end of Hafez street in Tehran, not far from the Hafez bookshop also indicated in the Lonely Planet guide. Here it is apparent that we are already in the more elegant part of Tehran, because they sell a number of typical Persian food we have hitherto only encountered in the cook book. Nevertheless, prices are not remarkably higher than in other similar places: for two persons we have paid 3-4000 tomans, that is about 3 euros all in all for two dishes with meat per head, accompanied with reyhân, cooked tomatos and fermented yogurt drink, duq. If the foreigner does not protest in time, he will also receive a bottle of Coca-Cola which, in spite of the American embargo, is bottled in Kerman.

But it seems that the authentic Persian kitchen, similarly to the Hungarian one of the eighties, can only be tasted by those invited for a family dinner. We were not that lucky. Nevertheless, when in the last days we complained about Iranian restaurant food to the receptionist of our hotel, Mr. Mousavi, he could not permit the honor of Persian kitchen to be damaged, and offered to us that in the two evenings left it would be his wife to cook for us, and he would serve it for us in the hotel. And it happened so. In the first evening we had a magnificent vegetarian dinner (what a pity that Ana already could not taste it), while on the second evening, the last one before our departure, we were served the crown of Persian kitchen: fesenjân, chicken prepared in sauce of walnut and pomegranate.

If any Persian reads this post, hereby I announce well in advance that in April we are going to go to Persia again, this time together with Wang Wei. We both feel a great respect of good kitchen, and both are grateful guests.