Encounters in Kurdistan

Arriving at eight in the morning at Sanandaj, after a whole-night bus trip to Hamedan, after looking for a long distance taxi at five in the morning, after a hundred and fifty-five-kilometer taxi ride, squeezed together with two Kurds on the back seat, always higher on the serpentine road among the barren mountains, then, at the bottom of a valley opening wide, a multitude of concrete cubes: the capital city of Kurdistan. A bewildering mass of Kurdish trousers. Eating at eight in the morning the only dish served by the breakfast place of the bazaar, cream of wheat with cinnamon and sugar, childhood memories, only the wheat is different, and they mixed oil in to make it more nutritious. In the clothing rows of the bazaar, elegant mannequins dressed in elegant Kurdish clothes. Sitting at nine in the morning in the tea room of the bazaar, with Kurdish music lingering outside, old Kurdish merchants having a tea on the terrace, Kurdish-language talking around the four tables inside. The Kurds coming and leaving all palpate and judge a sport shoe that someone put out for sale next to the counter. This is a moment that I must described here, from here I have to take it with me, closed in the notebook, like a pebble from the shore of the sea.


Café 90, an old-fashioned café in Sanandaj’s old town. Hookah, backgammon, loud slapping of dice, guttural sounds of Kurdish speech. I look at my phone, here I finally have a signal. I open the laptop, all eyes across the room look upon me. I smile around, then I lean above the notebook. Tea is served, the boy in the brown Kurdish suit smiles at me, he asks in Kurdish, I reply in Persian as to where I came from. An Iranian, when asking kojahl, is not curious of your origins, but of where you live. In the pre-modern Iranian identity, the most important item is religion, the second is residence, while nationality and language are rather accidental. “May I take photos?” “Befârmaid”, he offers to me the whole coffee house with a generous gesture. An old Kurd appears in the crosshairs of my lens in the door, seems to be a teacher, he is greeted with great respect. He looks at me in surprise. “Kojahl?” “From Germany.” He comes to me, shaking my hands. “Angela Merkel is a great person. We will never forget to Germany what they did for us.” He embraces me and kisses me on either side. I feel embarrassed, I do not deserve this award, but it feels definitely better than what I would have received if it turned out that I am Hungarian.


Before Marivan, near the Iraqi border, a fifty-kilometer road snakes up onto one of the roofs of the world, the ridge of the Zagros, the village of Howraman. For thousands of years nobody could conquer this isolated valley, the few locals are farmers in contrast to the rest of the Kurds, of whom the passage of the armies for over a thousand years have made nomads. Even their language differs from that of the other Kurds. At the junction I get out of the minibus, I ask a taxi driver how much he would charge to take me up. Thirty thousand, he says, anxiously about whether I will accept it, seven and half euros. I take a seat in the car. “Today I sleep there, tomorrow I come back.” He does not reply, he is struggling. Finally he utters: “Then I have to go up twice, it is sixty thousand.” “Of course”, I assure him, “two going up, twice as much.” He relaxes, becomes joyful, tells about the region around us in a strong Kurdish accent, he pronounces the Persian v as ua, I am initially alarmed when he pronounces Marivan as Marihuana. He is also from the valley of Howraman. Adamhâ-ye ouramâni kheyli khuband, the people of Howraman are very good, he tells many times. When we get to the point from where cars cannot go on, I continue my way on foot. I heard that there was a small hotel in the village, but no, it is just being built. But the owner does not let me down. “I will send you to a family here, they usually accept guests, they will give a good dinner, they will give a good breakfast.” Lonely Planet also says that the people of Howraman are so hospitable that it is difficult to leave them, so I do not worry. The head of family receives me in silence, shows me the neglected rooms, I sleep on the earth. There is no word about dinner, nor of breakfast. Which does not matter in itself, I always have some tins with me, but I exactly understand that in their hospitable culture this behavior means that they do not consider me a person, just like when the Europeans intrude with their cameras into the intime sphere of locals, like among monkeys. I am angry. The next day at noon the taxi waits for me at the same place. “Ouramân khub bûd?”, that is, whether Howraman good was. Kheyli khashang bûd, it was beautiful, I reply. Ham khâne khub bûd? the house was also good? Khâne khub bûd, vali adamhâ khub nabûdand, the house was good, but the people not, I say. He is shocked. Why, what happened? They did not even give me a cup of tea, I say. He also exactly knows what it means, he falls silent. The cheerfulness of yesterday completely abandons him, he grimly sits behind the wheel. Before arriving at Marivan, he stops at a butcher’s shop, he buys meat, he buys warm bread. A little later he stops in front of his own house. “We go in, we have lunch, is it all right?” he asks. “All right”, I say. While the lunch is being cooked, he feeds me with walnuts and grapes grown in his own garden in Howraman, we look at family photos. Beautiful girls on the blossoming spring Kurdish mountains, he and his wife in the meadows of Howraman. “Really beautiful pictures”, I say. “The people of Howraman are very good”, I say.

In torn pants, dusty shoes, dirty shirt, with a scaly face from the mountain sunshine, sleepless and unwashed I enter the best hotel of Kurdistan. The four-star Hotel Shadi rises as a hypermodern castle on the hilltop above the capital city of Kurdistan, the proud red inscription lights from far on its facade. I did not intend to stay for the night in Sanandaj, but the minibus from Marivan was delayed for several hours, and this was the only hotel whose name I could tell the driver. The receptionist seems not to wonder. “Two hundred eighty thousand, but we can give you a discount of eighty, so two hundred thousand, that is, fifty euros.” “Let it be.” A wonderful view of the city, good wifi, quiet, work until dawn, tomorrow I will sleep anyway on the bus to Kashan, for which I also order a ticket for 11 a.m., I will be there at seven in the evening. An extensive breakfast, real coffee, I serve myself twice. At ten I go down with the backpack to the reception. “I am really sorry, they called us from the terminal, that the bus was canceled, it wil leave only at eight in the night.” That one will arrive at Kashan only on Thursday morning, completely tired, and in that evening I must start to guide the ten-day Iranian tour. “No matter, I will take long distance taxis.” “And why don’t you go by plane? It leaves at 11, it is half an hour to Tehran, then two hours to Kashan with bus.” It will not be cheap, but let it be. The girl is calling. “Unfortunately the ticket sale is closed. But wait a minute.” She speaks to someone in Kurdish, with great respect. “The boss called the captain of the airport, they will prepare a ticket for you.” I go by the hotel’s car, with a driver in uniform, even accompanied by a stewardess. In the airport I am arranged out of turn, the captain personally brings the ticket, with an aristocratic gesture he rejects payment. The hotel has repaid its price. In the waiting room, nicely printed free books to take away, poems and short stories in Kurdish and Persian. At the security check they let me take the camera out of the backpack. “Switch it on.” I do so, but it does not show anything, I have to shot a picture to make it appear working. The complete security apparatus appears on the LED. The inspector smiles with satisfaction, but he turns aside my offer to take a picture of him, too. Boarding some minutes later. Now I sit here above the clouds, sometimes I also take a picture of them. Soon we take off. I go to the Âzadi terminal, at three I will be in Kashan. I will have enough time to go to my favorite barber, in the evening for a tea in the garden of Shah Abbas, and tomorrow I will greet relaxed the group in the airport of Tehran. Welcome to the marvelous East.

The Persian banknote

If you catch a taxi in Tehran, and before you sit down in it, you ask the obligatory question: chand mishe, how much it will cost, there is a good chance that the driver will say nothing, instead showing the banknote whose value he wants to receive at the end of the ride. Indeed, speaking, as we know from The Little Prince, is a source of misunderstanding, especially in Tehran. Because if he said an amount, he would say it in toman, which is one zero less than the amount printed on the banknote in rial. Thus, in the discussion following the ride, both parties would feel cheated: the tourist, because the driver requests ten times the amount agreed in the beginning, and the driver, because the tourist wants to give only one tenth of the amount agreed.

The toman as a currency was introduced in Iran by the Ilkhans, the descendants of Genghis Khan, the Mongol rulers of Persia. This is indicated by the Mongol origin of its name, which means “ten thousand”. So many soldiers constituted one basic unit of the army of the Mongol and Turkic peoples, and so many dinars made up one golden toman, the royal thaler of the Ilkhans. The silver currency of exchange between the two was the rial, of which eight made one toman until 1825. In that year the Qajar rulers introduced the qiran as a silver currency of exchange instead of the rial. The name of the latter thus was available, and it was later used by Shah Reza Pahlavi, when in 1932, with the introduction of the decimal system, he also reformed the monetary system, choosing the name rial for its basic unit.

The 500-rial banknotes of the two Pahlavi shahs, father and son, from an antique shop in the bazaar of Isfahan

Collective memory, however, is more conservative than we think, and it has retained the idea that the rial is actually a money of exchange needing a superior unit. Therefore, the Persians still count in tomans, in this officially non-existent financial unit, which is ten times the value of the rial, thus they call, for example, a one-hundred-thousand-rial bill, ten-thousand tomans.

To make counting even more complicated, after 1979, the Islamic revolution, huge inflation swept over the country, primarily due to the billions of dollars of capital rescued from Iran. Prices jumped many thousands-fold, several zeros appeared on the banknotes, and they have not yet disappeared even today. However, the common language cuts the zeros off the end of the amounts expressed in tomans. Therefore, if something in the bazaar costs, say, ten tomans (for example, a half pound of nice pistachios), it means ten thousand “real” tomans, and they expect a one-hundred-thousand-rial bill in return. The toman amounts free of excess zeros are sometimes called khomeinis (that is, the above bag of pistachios would be ten khomeinis), but this is not widespread.

And if it were not already complicated enough, they also make all the banknotes more or less identical. They appear in various pale colors, each has to the right the portrait of Imam Khomeini, and above in the middle a number with lots of zeros. Let us look at the seven little differences. The examples were stylishly photographed on the bed covers of my various hotels in Iran.



The banknotes of five thousand and fifty thousand rials (five hundred and five thousand tomans) are both orange in color. Check the reverse. The smaller has a medieval Persian ceramic pot, this is about twelve and a half eurocents, that is, a big bottle of mineral water. The bigger, which is 1.25 euro, shows a blank map of Iran, and, accordingly, this is what a taxi ride generally costs from anywhere to anywhere (also because for the taxi driver it is the easiest to simply show five fingers).



The banknotes of ten thousand and one hundred thousand rials (one thousand and ten thousand tomans) come in shades of green. The smaller has Mountain Damavand on its reverse, this is twenty-five eurocents, and it is worth two cups of tea in a teahouse, or a round-trip ticket on the subway. The bigger has the English translation of a beautiful poem by Saʿadi and the tomb of Saʿadi in Shiraz, and, accordingly, you can buy for it a nice CD of Persian classical music, or an entrance ticket to one of the much-hyped monuments.


The twenty-thousand rials (two thousand tomans) bill is the most reliable, because it has no big brother. Its color is blue, and its back shows the main square of Isfahan, with the two masterpieces built by Shah Abbas the Great, the Imam Mosque and the Ali Qapu Palace. The value is 50 eurocents, that is, a big cup of yogurt, or the recommended donation in a mosque or to a beggar.

In 2008 it was suggested that four zeros should be cut off the rial bills, to make them manageable amounts. According to Persian custom, however, the result was a further complicaton of the system. The reform has not taken place, but they issued two so-called “traveler’s checks” in the value of 500 thousand and 1 million rials (50 thousand and 100 thousand tomans), which are practically used as banknotes. The number printed on these is, however, simply 50 and 100, so you can only guess how they are called, because as a toman, they should have three zeros, as a rial, four. On your entry to Iran, you first encounter these unnamed banknotes, because at the first money exchange they place these in your hand.



The banknote of fifty ???-s (five hundred thousand rials, fifty thousand tomans) is 12.5 euro, the price of a good dinner for one person in a good place. This comes in two versions, I have just seen the new one for the first time.


The bill of hundred ???-s (one million rials, one hundred tomans) is worth 25 euro. This is such a big amount, that I cannot remember anything that you can buy for it.


Sometimes, as the fortune money found on the earth, you get some coins as well, for example when they give back from a banknote in a grocery store. They come in one and two thousand rials value (one hundred and two hundred tomans), with several different reverse designs. I usually put them aside as fortune coins, if only not to weight down my pocket. Just this morning, as I set out for the preparation of our next year’s tour in Kurdistan, I got a brand new shining two thousand rials coin, with a hitherto unknown design on the back. I consider to be encouragement.

The house

This blade-thin house (enlarge!), squeezed between two streets, could stand somewhere in southern France or Italy. However, this one stands in Isfahan. This is what I love about it. Along the street, small shops in a line, from the alley, the entrances of the flats belonging to the shops. From the flats, warm light flows onto the street.

The two man talking at the right, who while I was shooting, discreetly retreated next to the cars, now come forth from the shadow, with Muslim rosaries in their hands. “Do you like it?”, they point at the house. “Yes, very much.” “Come in, we have very good socks.” “Unfortunately I have just bought some in the bazaar,” I show him the plastic bag, I am really regretful. Yesterday in the Zagros, during rock climbing, or rather during rock descent, the last one was punctured by all my ten toes, I had to buy one with the logo of Dolce and Gabbana, which I will flash later during the evening in the party. He enters the shop, then comes back. “Then please accept one as a gift.”

Stories from Iran

Golestan Hotel is the most elegant small hotel in downtown Tehran. The manager’s office with its leather armchairs and ebony work desk is the embodiment of Oriental luxury. The reservation for a twenty-and-some-member group must be arranged in the proper way, it cannot be done simply by e-mail. A meeting at eleven o’clock, handshakes, coffee, soft drinks. Family, health, business. Apart from the reservation, we also touch upon the topics of advantageous currency exchange, further collaboration, discount hotel reservations across the country, support for my preparatory tour in Kurdistan. Meanwhile, life goes on, a Russian tour leader comes in to beg for rooms in the packed hotel, they find them for him. In the meantime we chat in Russian, he is a photographer, organizes photo tours across the former Soviet Union and in the Middle East, we exchange addresses. A young Chinese couple comes to book flight tickets, I ask them in Chinese. They have a tourist office in Shanghai, specialized in exotic tours within China. Tibet, Sichuan, Yünnan, just where I want to organize a tour in next year. They invite me, promising to help me in everything. At one we shake hands with the manager, we exchange good wishes. The room reservation took a long time, but it passed usefully.


A taxi to Darband, the bohemian quarter of northern Tehran, where the city’s elite goes out to dinner and to let the fortune-telling parrots draw them verses of Hafez. The thin, gray-haired taxi driver is from Iranian Azerbaijan, the city of Urumiye. “Are you Turkish?” I ask of him in Azerbaijani Turkish. “No, no”, he answers in surprise in the same language. “Persian?” “No.” “Armenian?” “No.” “Then?” For a while he stares out of the window, and then he turns to me. “You are Christian, not Muslim, aren’t you?” “Yes,” I say. He makes the sign of the cross. “I am Assyrian Christian.”


The clay walls of the old town of Kashan. At the corner, a little old man passes next to me. He looks back in surprise, trying to reconcile the Kurdish pants with the large telephoto camera. Soon I see him again in a small mosque courtyard, in the midst of the Ashura preparations, while explaining to four other men what he has just seen. “There he is”, he points at me, when I show up. They call me over. “From where?” “From Germany.” “Bayern München gut!” they shout. “Iran is good?” they ask. The Persians consider it a mirage if a foreigner just speaks to them in Persian. In the best case, they reply in short phrases, but they usually just gesture. In this case, you have to play barkochba with them in concise Persian phrases. “Yes, I love Iran very much.” “Which is better, Germany or Iran?” “I like Iran.” “What is good in Iran?” “The people” They look at each other with disbelief. “Are you a Christian?” “Yes.” “Is Islam good?” “Muslim people are very good.” As encouragement, I add the Shiite salutation of Ashura, “Ya Hossein, long live Imam Hossein”, killed at Kerbala almost one and a half thousand years ago on this day. The old man in the middle gets up, goes to the neighboring kiosk, buys an pineapple drink. He ceremoniously bows before me, offers it on his hand as a tray. “Please accept it.” I ceremoniously say thanks for it. Taking photos, shaking hands.

Persian Jewish manuscripts

King Ahashverush and the maidens, Shahin, Ardashir-nameh, Persia, 2nd half of the 17th century (Berlin, Staatbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz)

When I read that Rio Wang’s travel program in Iran included “a ramble in the eight-hundred-year old and still vivid Jewish quarter, the largest Jewish center in Iran”, I thought of a wondrous collection of Jewish manuscripts, Skies of parchment, seas of ink, edited by Marc Michael Epstein and just published by the Princeton University Press. So I would like to give our readers some insights into arts and literature in the Judeo-Persian community between the 15th and the 19th centuries.

The Jewish community came in Persia in two phases. The first was around 700 BC at the time of the Assyrian hegemony, when King Sargon II relocated people to the country of the Medes, in the north and west of today’s Iran; and the second one and half century later, after the Babylonian occupation of Jerusalem. A large part of the diaspora stayed there even after they were set free by King Cyrus in 539, and they settled throughout the Persian empire, where they remained for more than two millennia.

One of the earliest known texts documenting this community, dating from the 8th century, is a Judeo-Persian merchant’s letter which Aurel Stein found in 1901 at Dandan-Uiliq, a trading centre on the Silk Road in Chinese Turkestan. It is written in the Persian (or rather Judeo-Persian) language, using the Hebrew script. This practice had been in use in Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia for over a millennium, as this was the diaspora’s way to preserve their Jewish identity and historical heritage.


The most important medieval Judeo-Persian manuscripts include the 1319 handwritten copy of Torat Mosheh, the earliest known Judeo-Persian text of the Pentateuch. This Judeo-Persian translation of the Torah was also one of the earliest printed texts in this language, appearing as a polyglot Pentateuch published in Constantinople in 1546.

But far from the beautiful illuminated manuscripts of the Jewish communities in Europe, these first Judeo-Persian medieval manuscripts contained only text, and we have to wait until the Safavid era to find illustrations in a Judeo-Persian manuscript. Aniconism, in fact, is a significant characteristic of Eastern Jewish manuscripts.

Yes, think of all those medieval Armenian manuscripts in Isfahan Vank Cathedral, illuminated with beautiful letters and full page miniatures – and then forget them. We only know twelve or thirteen illustrated Judeo-Persian manuscripts, none of which dates earlier than the 17th century. Twelve or so known surviving manuscripts – one hundred and seventy-nine miniatures.

Of course, the Armenian community in Isfahan was a very young one, just coming from Armenia after Shah Abbas ransacked the country, it was a community rich of its own traditions. In contrast, the Jewish community was an old Persian community and its prolonged contact with the Persian culture produced profound acculturation, especially in literature and applied arts. And the period of the production of these Judeo-Persian manuscripts coincides with a very difficult time of anti-Jewish persecutions, a time when the community was not very well-off economically: a number of anti-Jewish incidents took place during the reign of Shah Abbas II. Nonetheless, a few Muslims, among them ranking officials, resisted the order to force the Jews to convert. Along with Jews, Sufis as well as other religious minorities, such as Armenians and Zoroastrians were also targets of religious intolerance. However, most of the major Jewish communities appear to have converted in 1656, and their members became anusim (“forced converts”) for about seven years, outwardly complying with Shiite Islam while practicing Judaism in secret. A practice ironically similar to that of taqiya (dissimulation), followed by the Shiites for many centuries. The events are retraced in the Ketāb-e anusi, “The book of Converts” by Bābāʿi ben Loṭf, a Jewish witness in Kashan.

Angels uproot trees in Ahashverush’s garden. Shahin, Ardashir-nameh, Persia, 2nd half of the 17th century (Berlin, Staatbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz). This is an instance where Talmudic and midrashic references are used to enliven the story. The illustration is a fanciful expansion of Esther 7:7. In the biblical text, Esther has just exposed Haman’s plot. Ahashverush rises in anger and “went into the palace garden”. The Talmud suggests that, as we are not told that his anger cooled, he also “returned in a fury” – but why? Because angels in the semblance of men were uprooting the trees in the royal garden and apparently they were doing so at the command of Haman.

Even if these manuscripts are remarkable, they never reach the perfection of most Persian miniature paintings. They could not equal miniatures produced in the royal workshops like these ones below, and so they look rather like modest popular and provincial works from ateliers of smaller courts, repeating classical schemes – mountains and clouds, riders and strait-winged angels. That is, the Persian Jews began to commission manuscripts that recounted the stories of their heroes in a way reflecting the style and manner of Safavid courtly manuscripts.

The Judeo-Persian community had never been especially productive in the area of thought or law, they just followed the classical teachings of the early medieval rabbis. These manuscripts also illustrate Hebrew transliterations of Persian romances such as Yusuf and Zulayḵā (Joseph and Putiphar’s wife). Some are even single leaves of poetry. Most of them are secular rather than sacred works. Sometimes, when they recounted their own themes, they transliterated epic narratives from the Persian literary community, and included various popular romances. The best examples are the illuminated manuscripts of the epics of Shahin, a 14th-c. Jewish poet from Shiraz, Musa-nameh (history of Moses), imitating the iconographic tradition of Firdausi’s Shah-nameh and connecting Moses with the pantheon of Persian heroes. The text and of course the illustrations describe his ordeal of battling with a lion, a wolf and then a dragon, and prove him worthy of encountering the burning bush.

We can assume the manuscripts were written and illuminated for prominent members of the larger Jewish communities, such as those of Isfahan or Kashan. It is not possible to prove that these manuscripts were produced by Jews, as they are all unsigned (but it seems that no prohibition would have restrained them from acquiring these skills). Nevertheless, some painters may have been Muslims as it is suggested by the illuminated version of Shahin’s Musa-nameh, copied in 1686 in Tabriz, where Moses’s face is systematically covered by a veil on which it is read in Persian script “His Excellency Moses” (janāb-e ḥażrat-e Musā).

Moses with a white veil on his face and a halo of golden flames watches Pinchas impaling Cosbi and Zimri as they are locked in a sexual embrace (Numbers 25:6-8), a very unusual scene. The Musa-nameh emphasize tales of battles between the people of Israel and their enemies, and Moses appears in a manner clearly designed to parallel Muhammad in an implicit comparison.

But perhaps it was a Jewish painter, who wished to show his work to Muslims, and so he complied with iconographic models that respected Muslim sensibilities. In fact, some divergences between several miniatures and the texts they illustrate suggest that the painters, whether Jews or Muslims, were unable to read the Judeo-Persian text, and had to be told about the content of their pictures. If the painters were Muslims, these manuscripts are the examples of a Jewish-Muslim cooperation. Clearly, the texts were written by Jews, but Muslim artists may have painted the illustrations, following their patron’s instructions.

Some of the manuscripts are rather polemical, intending to compare and exalt Jewish heroes to Muslim holy characters. Islam, enshrining versions of the Jewish narrative in the Quran, had incorporated these holy personages in its own tradition so that the representation of Moses with the attributes of Muhammad was not exempt from danger – had Muslims been able to read the Judeo-Persian text. The recurrent glorification of Jewish heroes projects images of empowerment for themselves in a time of persecution. It’s a nostalgic representation of a better time, an appeal to the present Shah to live up to its exalted heritage of tolerance, a support for the Jews and a wish that once again the armed Jews, “sons of Jacob”, get revenge on “the accursed people of Haman”.

Photographer behind the bar counter

“Are you a photographer?” the tall, thin man asks me, as he overtakes me along Chahar Bagh road, on the way to the bazaar of Isfahan. “No, I only take photos.” “Everybody starts like that.” He stares at the camera like an expert. “I have the same, but one number earlier.” “Are you a photographer?” “Yes, a press photographer, mostly for Iranian newspapers, but I have already published in Spiegel and National Geographic as well.” “Will you show me your photos?” “You’re welcome. I have a coffee shop here in the bazaar, I invite you for a coffee.”


Hassan Ghayedi’s one-man coffee shop is the only café in the city-in-the-city-sized bazaar of Isfahan. In Iran under the embargo, you can buy coffee almost nowhere, but in the small shop of Hassan you can choose from the best types. I secretly get a cup as a non-Muslim, the Ramadan fast is not yet over.

“The greatest Iranian photographers? Well, Cartier-Bresson. And Ingo Morath. They already knew all about Iran. As they see people, the Iranian landscape. This is the benchmark for us, too.”

Iranian photos by Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1950

“I grew up in the mountainous region of Lorestan, near the Iraqi border. My father worked in Qatar, from where he sent a camera to my sister. I photographed a roll with it. My first picture was a mountain tulip, then the family. When I had it developed, my employer, because I started in a café there as well, said he would buy this first picture from me. He paid a good price for it. A few days later he showed me that it was in one of the most popular Iranian weeklies, a full-page picture, under my name. He said I should be a photographer. He gives me a week off to go to Tehran to the photographers’ club, to introduce myself, to ask for advice. Well, that’s how it started.”

He asks for my Canon, takes a picture of the vendors next door, he lets me take some pictures of him and of his wife, who has arrived in the meantime. The latter also examines the result with an expert eye. “Nice, clean image.” Night is falling, the Ramadan fast is slowly coming to an end, friends are gathering in front of the bar, all coffee-hungry photographers. One of them assumes a pose, points at himself, wants me to photograph him. They bend over the photo, critically looking at the result. They are satisfied. They all assume a pose.

“What kind of music do you like?” He is wondering, his wife says instead. “The Persian masters. Shajarian. Dariush Rafee.” Hassan nods.

“What do you most like to photograph?” “I’d like to photograph distant lands, if the coffee shop would let me go. To Abyaneh [50 km from the bazaar] I have already gone. To Sar Agha Seyyed [100 km] not yet. You did? Will you show me your photos? Will you upload them for me? But I mostly take pictures here in Isfahan, in the squares, in the mosques, on the bridge. In the bazaar, the vendors and the visitors. This is what I know, here I am at home.”



Hafez: Qatl-e in khasteh… Dariush Rafiʿee. From the CD Golnâr (2006)
Photos by Hassan Ghayedi. Many pictures are not displayed in the mosaic, they can be seen only by clicking on one of the tiles (logically, the first one), and scrolling through the large images.