The ceremony known as golab giri is well known and much loved in Iran. It is the traditional process by which rosewater essence is distilled from a flower known as the Mohammadi rose, harvested over a three- to four-week period around May. I was keen to witness this ceremony, which I had heard about since my childhood but never seen. Iran’s best rosewater comes from around the city of Kashan, 250 kilometres south-east of Tehran and on the edge of the Great Salt Desert of central Iran. Killing two birds with one stone, I decided to book myself on a two-day coach tour. Taking coach tours is not usually my idea of travel, but the tour has become a staple of middle-class Iranian activity and so I convinced myself that a little ‘toor’ would give me an entertaining insight into this particular corner of Iranian life. I was not to be disappointed.
The sight of an orderly queue of scowling elderly women did not augur a promising start. Amidst a sea of greying hair poking out from under sombre hejabs, I climbed onto the bus and was ushered to my seat. Just as I was weighing up whether to make a dash for it, an attractive young lady in a white manteau climbed onto the bus. She was joined by a young man whose hair was so smoothed down it looked as though he had been doing head-stands in an oil slick. This gentleman, the lady proudly announced, unprompted, to everyone on the bus as she audaciously whipped off her headscarf, was her fiancé. There were claps of approval and good wishes offered all round as the formerly dour matrons blossomed into smiles, accompanied by the obligatory chorus of comments like: ‘Aren’t they an adorable couple’; ‘Their children will be handsome little things, won’t they?’; and ‘How beautiful she is. Her nose has been very well done.’
Having seated everyone, our host for the tour squealed the PA into action and proceeded with the customary welcome speech, at the end of which he added, ‘Despite my appearance I’m a kafar [unbeliever], so relax.’ He had a protruding, vulpine face and sported a greying beard (usually the badge of a hezbollahi) that did him no favours in a country where appearances count for a lot. His eyes, though, were warm, his voice friendly with a touch of playful impudence and his silver hair, on closer inspection, carefully groomed. As the ‘toor’ host gave his welcoming remarks, it became clear that we were occupying a microcosmic bubble which was leagues away from the image that official Iran liked to project of itself. Here was a young single woman travelling with her boyfriend/fiancé, both all fancied up, she whipping off her headscarf at the first opportunity, a middle-aged Lothario unashamedly joking that he was a kafar – and all this among a group of strangers who, despite never having seen one another before, somehow immediately understood that they were all of a type.
The ‘toor’ host announced that we would be going around the bus introducing ourselves and stating our professions. Having been repeatedly advised to avoid announcing any literary aspirations to strangers, I began to fret despite the seemingly sympathetic atmosphere. The thirty or so ladies ahead of me were getting into their stride and passing round pictures of their sons and daughters, many of whom seemed to have successful careers as doctors and engineers in Europe and the USA, affording me some time to come up with a suitable cover story. Finally it was my turn. When I stood up and announced that I lived in London and had come over to explore the country, I could feel the collective sigh of relief. From the front I heard one of the ladies call, ‘Batcheh joun [Dear boy], why don’t you get rid of that awful beard? You terrified me when I saw you clamber onto the bus.’
The introductions served their ice-breaking purpose and soon our tour guide was drumming the jovial beat of an Iranian folk song on the microphone with his fingers. It did not take long for one of the more elderly ladies on the tour to leap to her feet and accompany him with her gravelly tones whilst pirouetting in the aisle, waving the hem of her floor-length roupoush coat like a flamenco dancer. Another joined them, clicking her forefingers and gyrating her upper body. The whole bus was soon engulfed by song and dance for the remainder of the journey, interspersed by anti-establishmentarian quips by the silver fox ‘toor’ host that met with defiant cheers of approval.
Iranians have always been masters of making light of any situation and finding that strain of hedonism in themselves. Here, a busload of like-minded people travelling through a barren wilderness, a microphone and a narrow aisle was all that was needed for the party to erupt spontaneously. The three hours to Kashan dissolved in an orgy of singing, dancing, joking and general merriment.
* * *
Kashan is an old city built on top of a yet older settlement. Tappeh Sialk is the site of an archaeological dig in the town’s suburbs that has unearthed traces of one of the earliest human settlements, dating as far back as 6000 BCE in the early Neolithic period. A team of French archaeologists led by the legendary Roman Ghirshman in the 1930s uncovered what they suspected to be the remains of a 7,500-year-old ziggurat – a tiered structure originally thought to be of Mesopotamian origin1 and the earliest form of religious architecture. Mr Toor Host (as I had come to think of him) had, between his singing and dancing routines, given us the potted history of Sialk with such poetic elegance and verve that the entire bus was eager to arrive at what was clearly evidence of Iran’s greatness ‘while the rest of the world, especially the Europeans, were still swinging from branches. They, with their wretched computers, forget that we have tens of thousands of years of civilisation behind us.’ In his agitation, he clearly needed one of those computers, or at least a calculator, but all the ladies were now nodding earnestly.
Their reaction when we arrived at Sialk was one of unbounded disappointment. All of Mr Toor Host’s temples, pools and grand avenues were now nothing but a huge mound of rubble. The odd wall had been painstakingly excavated and, with a bit of imagination, the tiers of the ziggurat could just about be made out, but this did little to assuage the disgruntlement of our party. At one stage it looked as though mutiny was brewing, but Mr Toor Host managed to stave off the rebellion with an impassioned – and presumably largely imagined – re-enactment of how the ritual procession would walk up the large central walkway and on to the 7,500-year-old bricks of the highest tier where the ziggurat’s altar sat.
From Sialk it was a further short ride to the Fin Gardens, a luxurious, leafy pleasure garden and bathing complex originally built for the Safavid shahs. The walled enclosure is known to have existed in 1504, when it was used as a meeting place by Shah Ismail, but it was in the reign of Shah Abbas in the early seventeenth century that a royal residence, bathhouses and a central pavilion were built on the site, and it is for one of these bathhouses that the gardens have come to be renowned.
The bathhouse in question found its way into Iranian legend by being the scene of the assassination of Amir Kabir by the Qajar shah, Naser-al-Din (1848–96). Amir Kabir was a progressive prime minister highly respected for instigating social reform, implementing public services and revising the country’s questionable foreign policy by reducing their reliance on Britain and Russia and cultivating relationships with increasingly powerful states such as Austria, France and even the then-fledgling United States, which had no history of difficult relations with Iran. Chief tutor to a fifteen-year-old crown prince, Naser-al-Din Mirza, Kabir was influential in helping the monarch secure the throne. For this he was rewarded with the hand of the king’s sister. His innovative ideas, though, had made enemies of some influential figures and his growing popularity was a source of concern for the Queen Mother. Taking advantage of one of her son’s famed drinking bouts, she persuaded the inebriated monarch to have the statesman killed, claiming that he intended to usurp the throne. The Shah dismissed him from his position as prime minister, stripped him of his titles and banished him to Kashan.
After forty days of confinement, a royal messenger came to summon Kabir to Tehran for an audience with the King, leading him to believe that he was being reinstated in his previous position. Being a highly respectful man and deeply loyal to the King, he deemed it only right to bath before this royal audience. This drive to hygiene proved fateful. The envoys confronted Amir Kabir in the bathhouse with a very different kind of message. The Shah showed his gratitude for all that his old friend, childhood tutor and brother-in-law had done for him by magnanimously allowing him to choose his means of execution. The wily Kabir asked for his wrists to be slit, thinking that the king’s men might leave him to bleed out, thus giving him a chance to staunch the flow and escape his fate. His ruse failed and he bled to death on the floor of the bathhouse under the watchful gaze of his executioners. This event is commemorated in all its gruesome detail by a series of papier-mâché figures displayed in the low-roofed brick building.
Though the Fin Gardens have gone down in history as the site of the Amir Kabir assassination, the gardens themselves are noteworthy as being typical of traditional Persian garden design, involving the careful planning of dialogues between greenery, shade, flowers and flowing water. The Fin Gardens are a classic example of the famed chahar bagh layout, with their 2.6 hectares split into four (chahar) distinct gardens (bagh) by intersecting runnels flowing from a number of pools down the middle of cypress-lined walkways. These pools and runnels are fed by a large cistern outside the garden walls, filled by melt-water carried from the mountains to the west of the city in underground water channels called qanats. In a land of scarce water, the tranquil sound of life-giving flows can induce a near-poetic state and when this is accompanied by redolent flowers and respite from the sun under the canopy of a towering cypress tree, it is easy to understand the ancient Persian love for the garden.
The inhabitants of Iran were billed as ‘the great gardeners of antiquity’ by Xenophon, and the garden has been an inextricable part of Iranian life for thousands of years and is still a great source of pride to modern Iranians. Not long after settled communities sprang up, the nomadic hunter-reliant habits of the tribes having been traded for the more efficient and reliable agricultural means of food production, early inhabitants of the country began to cultivate the lands around their dwellings, irrigating them with intricate systems of water channels. These plots provided much-needed food, water and shade in the often harsh environment of the Iranian plateau. A favourite fact amongst Iranians and one they do not tire of repeating is that these early plots, the first gardens in history, were called pardis in the early Iranian language of Pahlavi.2 This is translated as ‘around the house’ and is the root of the Indo-European word ‘paradise’: ‘The Greek word parádeisos was first used by Xenophon to describe an enclosed park, orchard, or hunting preserve in Persia’, claims the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.3 The legendary hanging gardens of Babylon, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, were, according to myth and fascinated historians such as Strabo and Diodorus, built by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II around 600 BCE to please his wife Amytis, a Median princess who had grown homesick and hankered for the idyllic gardens of her Persian homeland.
The longer you linger in the Fin Gardens, the more the place seems to take hold of you, so it was with some reluctance that we all clambered aboard the bus for the short ride into Kashan itself. On arrival at the aptly named Amir Kabir hotel, when room keys were distributed in the lobby, a frisson of excitement ran through the gathered ladies. Our engaged couple were sharing a room. Conspiratorial whispers of approval rippled through our little group.
‘These young ones certainly have balls,’ one of them said to me excitedly, gripping my forearm with a wrinkled hand.
‘Not both of them, I hope.’ The old lady gave a giggle.
* * *
The clunking and groaning of the air-conditioning unit in the corner of my room was driving me around the bend but with the mercury pushing 40°C in the midday sun, there was no choice but to get used to it. Out of my hotel window I could see the domed roofs and crumbling mud-walled bungalows of the old town, seemingly seared into a state of timelessness by the relentless desert heat. Reaching up from many of the roofs were badgirs. The badgir is a simple but ingenious age-old form of air-conditioning. A tower reaches skywards with openings to catch even the slightest breeze that is then funnelled down into the house, often over a shaded pool of water, thus cooling the air – a much quieter and no doubt more efficient means of regulating the temperature of a house than the straining grey box taking up a large part of my hotel room.
Not all of the town is so stuck in the past, though. Kashan has long been famous for its hand-woven carpets but the large number of mechanised carpet-weaving factories it now boasts, although maintaining its status as a renowned manufacturer of textiles, is threatening its long and illustrious history of artisanship – a history integral to the town’s fortunes. From the end of the Seljuk period in the latter half of the twelfth century right through to the end of the Safavid period in the early eighteenth, Kashan flourished, its artisans gaining worldwide renown for their glazed earthenware tiles, many of which can today be seen in the British Museum. These tiles, or kashi in Persian, were of such great repute that they came to give the town its name.
* * *
After feeding on distinctly average kebabs I was shepherded back to our rather narcissistic yellow tour bus, anointed by big letters stuck to its windscreen as the ‘Golden Chariot’. As we headed from Kashan to a village called Abiyaneh, Mr Toor Host triumphantly described it as the last village to succumb to the Arab Muslim army in the seventh century. The elderly ladies were suitably impressed, but I would visit many towns and villages that claimed to be the last to fall to the invading Arabs. If nothing else, the high number of ‘last bastions’ was a measure of the confusion and contradiction so often found in Iran: on the one hand a fervent nationalism and anti-Arab sentiment, on the other fervent devotion to the greatest legacy that the Arabs bestowed on Iran – Islam.
The bus drove past a graveyard with triangular gravestones. This, Mr Toor Host informed us, was a Zoroastrian burial site. The triangular shape of the stones was a symbol of the tripartite tenet that is the cornerstone of the Zoroastrian faith: good thoughts, good words, good deeds. The fact that this was a cemetery indicated it was a modern Zoroastrian site, because the adherents of this ancient faith would, up to the middle of the twentieth century, dispose of their dead in a completely different way. They would deposit the bodies of their deceased on top of Towers of Silence, where they would be left to decompose and feed scavenging birds. To Zoroastrians the earth was considered a sacred element whose purity would be polluted by a decomposing body, as mankind is tainted by Ahriman’s darkness.
Abiyaneh’s most famous resident is Keshvar Khanoum, a Yoda-like figure under a metre tall with a voice that makes her sound as if she runs on helium. Short on stature but big on character, she guided us through the village’s immaculate main thoroughfare, which runs alongside a small stream. The dwellings were predominantly built in the traditional mud-brick fashion but given a red hue by the local soil and ground pomegranate skin.4 Since it’s a hillside village, many of the houses were built atop one another, the roof of the house below acting as the garden of the house above.
An old man tottered down the road carrying a bundle of sticks under one arm. White-haired women sat in soft-red doorways, huddled under colourful, floral-patterned chadors, quickly pulling them across their faces as soon as a camera was turned on them. The village was populated only by the very young and the very old; a fact due, a proud villager told us, to their middle-aged children being doctors, lawyers and engineers in Esfahan, Tehran and even abroad. It seemed hard to believe, looking at the weather-beaten faces that betrayed a lifetime of toil in the open air. The urbanisation of younger generations has been severely threatening rural life in much of Iran but here, thanks in large part to the income generated by tours such as ours, the village was thriving.
Leaving the hilly oasis settlement, we wound our way back down into the arid plain that made up the 30 kilometres back to Kashan. As the bus bumbled its way through the darkness, I noticed the members of our tour getting excited about something to our left. We were passing Natanz, described by Dr Arthur Upham Pope as ‘one of the loveliest mountain towns in Persia’.5 A picturesque town roughly 50 kilometres south of Kashan, it was until recently best known for its fruit orchards and its twelfth-century mosque. Now, of course, Natanz has earned a distinction – or rather a notoriety – of a very different sort. It is the site of the infamous nuclear facility at the heart of the global controversy. The side of the road bristled with anti-aircraft guns pointing expectantly heavenward. Meanwhile, at this very moment, I imagined a stealth bomber and its payload of a ‘controlled nuclear device’ flying high over our heads, its crew chattering away to a controller somewhere in Nebraska or Nevada. In the darkness of night the compound looked like a small town, lit up like a giant birthday cake. ‘Makes it a hard target, doesn’t it,’ one of the elderly ladies said wryly.
‘May God put a curse on them,’ said another lady, looking glum.
‘Who?’ I asked.
‘All of them – Americans, Iranians, Israelis, Palestinians, Chinese, Mexicans – the lot. They’re all rotten.’ Everybody nodded quietly in agreement. One of the ladies began a mournful song about the folly of love but gradually the pace and the mood picked up and it was not long before the bus was in full swing, with Mr Toor Host once more fully in control.
* * *
The next day was to be a special day, the reason for my trip to the Kashan area: the rosewater ceremony. We were all ready to set off before sunrise and clambered drowsily into the Golden Chariot to be driven to the little farming village of Ghamsar, famed for its Mohammadi roses. Some of the ladies were clearly not enjoying having their much-needed beauty sleep cut short but the early start was necessary. These flowers lose their scent once the sun’s rays hit them so they are harvested at first light. After a half-hour drive during which the denizens of the coach were eerily silent, we arrived at a small estate and drove into the grounds. The village itself had clearly prospered from the rosewater trade and the accompanying tourist interest.
The bagh seemed more overgrown than idyllic. Teeming with flora, it was dominated by leafy bushes dotted with fragrant pink Mohammadi flowers, smaller than normal roses and different in form. An old man and woman were dexterously picking the flowers and tossing them by the handful into burlap sacks hanging from their shoulders. The scent of the flowers, the sound of nature slowly rousing itself with the first rays of the rising sun and the backdrop of bold mountains glistening with the last remnants of snow on their peaks against the diaphanous blue of a cloudless sky was truly breathtaking. I sat on the ground to drink in the peaceful, pastoral scene. The people around me disappeared, time stopped. I was planted in a landscape painting, in a dream. A quick double tap on my shoulder snapped me out of my reverie. A rural accent warned me not to sit on the ground. Responding to my quizzical look, the man simply said, ‘Scorpions’.
Scorpions and their terrifyingly sinister reputation make up only a small portion of Iran’s menacing wildlife, the creation of which Zoroastrian cosmogony attributes to Ahriman, the evil influence in the universe. Other animals that fall into this category are snakes, spiders and most other venomous creatures that travel in rural Iran will necessarily throw up encounters with. Prior to my departure on almost every trip, I would be warned by Tehranis to watch out for scorpions, roteil and drakoola. The roteil is a type of tarantula attracted by the scent of blood that bites when falling from ceilings or tree branches. Its sting is located on its underbelly and a bite can be lethal. The drakoola is a type of fire-ant especially common in northern Iran. It sprays a noxious substance that causes skin to blister and boil; swiping at one with a hand causes the harmful liquid to spread to a larger area of exposed skin.
The Kashan area is particularly famed for its scorpions thanks to a legend dating back to the Arab invasion of the seventh century. Kashan’s thick town walls and solid defences managed to stave off the Arabs longer than most places. Not wanting to become embroiled in a lengthy siege, the Arab commander leading the assault ordered his troops to gather hundreds of scorpions from the surrounding area and pour them over the city walls. This ingenious tactic concentrated the minds of Kashan’s inhabitants and persuaded them to flee the city in panic, leaving its undefended gates wide open. Whatever the source of the terror, every Iranian – man, woman and child, young and old – has had the fear of scorpions drummed into them since childhood. I was certainly no exception. That one word snapped me smartly out of my reverie and, in as dignified a manner as possible, I strode smartly away.
A suitable quantity of the flowers having been harvested, we were taken to a large house in whose garden stood four vats. The roses were poured into these vats full of steaming water heated by gas fires underneath, their lids closed and sealed. Two tubes led upwards before plunging back down in an inverted ‘v’ shape into a smaller tank submerged in a trough of water. The vapours rose through the pipes and, when channelled through the submerged tanks, were sufficiently cooled by the water to condense and drip to the bottom as rosewater. The fumes were inebriating; one of our elderly ladies said that it reminded her of sharing a lift with a family of Arabs. The vast majority of rosewater produced in Iran is exported to Arab countries, where it is used to scent clothes and houses. The highest-quality rosewater is sent to Mecca to be mixed with water from the Zamzam well and used for the annual washing of the Ka’aba ritual. In Iran it is used predominantly for cooking, as are the dried rose petals, or made into jam. The rosewater itself was an incredibly effective cure for migraines, I was informed by another of the elderly ladies in our group, with the assurance that only comes either from firsthand experience or from being an elderly Iranian lady. Another of the ladies sidled up to me and whispered, ‘Back in my day it was used to perfume the water from the aftabeh.’ The aftabeh is the now plastic receptacle resembling a watering can found beside every Iranian toilet.
The sweet yet pungent smell, the vibrant pink of the petals, the peace of the well-kept garden, the early morning birdsong, the breeze and the warm rays of the rising sun mingling with each other against the backdrop of the distant mountains slowly turning turquoise in the dawn light – all this created a veritable feast for the senses. Before long, we were led onto a carpeted balcony where the thirty of us were treated to a very different kind of feast: a traditional Iranian breakfast. Boiled eggs, honey, goat’s cheese, fresh mint leaves, peeled walnuts and yoghurt were wrapped in floury sheets of unleavened lavash bread, eaten and washed down with steaming glasses of freshly brewed tea sweetened by a sugar cube clamped between the teeth.
One of the ladies hoisted herself up and came to sit next to me. ‘Why aren’t you married?’ she asked with a smile.
‘He’s got a farangi [foreign] girl waiting for him back in England. They do things differently over there,’ another of the group replied for me.
‘Nonsense,’ said the woman beside me, taking my hand in hers. ‘Why do you think he’s really come to Iran?’ I shifted awkwardly, beginning to blush under the gaze of the entire group. She patted my forearm as she reached into her handbag. After a brief rummage, she pulled out a dog-eared photograph and pressed it into my hand. ‘My niece. She’s a real beauty … and a wonderful cook.’