A shepherd under Alamut

The fortress of Alamut rises on an almost inaccessible rock. We are climbing up to it in the bed of the stream running down under the rock. The sun rises, it shines on the poplars along the stream, and the barren hillsides beyond the poplars. At the end of the village, when looking back from the beehives, we see that a small group turns up the road. Shepherds go in the mountain to replace their colleagues, and an old couple drive their six sheep to the pasture above the fortress. We await them. The old man on the white donkey returns with dignity our greeting. “So early?” he asks. “Did you sleep in the village? Where? Yeah, Agha Rusuli”, he places us in the coordinate network of the intelligible world. “Won’t it be very cold?” he asks by pointing at my short-sleeved shirt.” “By the time we reach the top, I will want to take this off as well”, I say. “I don’t go as high as you.” For a while we go along. Where the road forks, he beckons us to follow them. “Don’t go straight up, keep with us in the field, the fortress looks much nicer from here.” We go with them. At the next fork we look long after them, until they disappear behind the bend of the hill.

The power of Persian music

Persian setar player and his drunken public. Muhammad-Sharif Musawwir’s miniature from a copy of The Seated Princess, ca. 1600, perhaps from Bokhara. The Smithsonian Institute

Many times we have written that Persian music is one of the world’s most powerful and most sophisticated musical traditions. Hitherto our readers may have considered this as a personal bias. Now, however, we have an irrefutable evidence that Persian music has a greater impact than any other music on the bias-free children’s soul. Our reader Dániel Sturm olvasónk wrote the following message just an hour ago on the Facebook page of our blog:

Dear Studiolum! We always read your posts with great pleasure. The song included in the post Masouleh, 1975 has caused this effect to our 16-month old child: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dLIlW0yzfY He listens to a lot of music, but he never responded to anything so vehemently. He was at once passionate and serene. Thank you for this one, too!

We say thanks for the experience shared, which we share further below. As the music is hardly audible on the video, here we include both the Gilani folk song and the dance video. By starting both simultaneously perhaps you can better reconstruct the scene. And observe that the child is not only following the dynamic rhythm, but he is repeating the beginning of this very song!


Freidoun Poorreza – Hossein Hamidi: ناز بداشته Naz Bedashteh (Beautiful Bedashteh), Gilani folk song. From the album می گیلان Mi Gilan (in Gilaki) / Man-e Gilan (in Persian) (My Gilan) (2007)


For anyone who wants to try it him/or herself, instead of a lyric folk song here you are a real dance music from Lorestan in the Zagros mountain, from the Lori nomads, relatives of the Bakhtiaris, on kamanche and daf, the round Persian violin and the nomadic round drum whose leather is stretched on wooden frame.



Sepa va dopa. Lorestani dance

Lori dancers

Sar Agha Seyyed

The mountain ranges of Zagros in western Iran are mainly inhabited by nomadic tribes: before Shah Reza Pahlavi’s reforms in the 1930s they made up about ten percent of Iran’s population. But only a few among them were always nomadic, like the Qashqais, the descendants of the Azeri and Turkmen tribes which migrated to the south, the mountains above Shiraz, who with their picturesque clothing vivify the bazaar of Shiraz just as the black and white Bakhtiaris that of Isfahan, and about whom we would also like to write later. However, the Iranian-speaking nomads, such as the Kurdish, Lori and Bakhtiari tribes, are probably the offspring of ancient peasant cultures, whose villages were destroyed during the centuries of the Mongol conquest and the Ottoman-Persian wars, and the survivors who found refuge among the mountains changed agriculture for herdsmanship. This is suggested by several signs, such as the stone lions seen at the end of the previous post, which are still erected above the tombs of eminent chiefs, and whose ancestors once stood in front of the palaces of the ancient Median empire extending to the Zagros. And also by the fact that the Bakhtiari shepherds, if they can, set up new villages among the mountains: no longer farming villages, because there are only rocks there, but kind of shepherd centers, from which the families go out for two or three months long grazing expeditions in the surrounding mountains. One such village is سر آقا سید Sar Agha Seyyed, that is the fountain of a certain Sayyid Agha, two hundred kilometers to the east of Isfahan, directly under the crest of the Zagros.


چشمی کوهرنگ Cheshme-ye Kuhrang (Kuhrang Fountain; one of the best known fountains in the Bakhtiari region). From the Mahoor Institute’s موسیقی بختیاری Musiqi-ye bakhtiâri (Bakhtiari ethnic music) album (2007).


One of Iran’s many-star tourist attractions is the village of Masuleh on the Caspian shore, whose houses cling to the mountainside like swallow’s nests. However, Masuleh is almost only an artificial tourist show in comparison with Sar Agha Seyyed and the other similar unnamed villages, and perhaps owes its reputation to being accessible with tourist bus. To the Bakthiari villages no roads lead: the Bakhtiaris themselves arranged it so during the centuries, thereby defending themselves against the various invaders from the Mongols to the Persian state. And the region is anyway blocked from the outside world for eight months of the year. When, however, it can be visited, it is beautiful green, and in the short spring and summer the wild and “reverse” tulips, that is, the imperial crowns feverishly try to blossom. As you can see it in the photos by Maryam Zandi, Abbas Ghaderi and Mirjam Terpstra.

Bakhtiari tents

I long have wanted to write about the Bakhtiari nomads living above Isfahan, in the mountains of Chahar Mahal, who still today migrate by millions from the summer grasslands to the winter ones, from the valleys up the mountains, along spectacular roads, swimming over rapid mountain rivers together with their flocks, as it was shown in the first Iranian ethnographic film, the Grass (1925), and who in the spring descend with colorful carts to Isfahan to pass in the bazaar their rugs made in the wintertime. For a starter, let us see the photo series made on them by Alieh Sâdatpur – the photographer recording the old bicycles of Isfahan –, found on the blog of the Bakhtiari folk musician Bahman Alaeddin, that is Masoud Bakhtyari. The accompanying music is also taken from his album.


Masoud Bakhtyari (Bahman Alaeddin): Tey tum rah تی توم ره /Râh-e bârik راه باریک (Lane) (4'13"). From the CD Bahang بهنگ /Arus عروس (Bride) (2007).