Tracking down Mr Djavadi’s car parts shop proved easier than anticipated. Mr Djavadi had been my father’s driver over thirty years ago and had remained in warm and friendly contact with my family. Twice a year, at Nowrouz and on my father’s birthday, he would telephone, most of the twenty-minute conversation taken up by both men enquiring about the other’s health and the health of their respective families. When, in their last conversation, my father had told him that I was in Iran and was planning on visiting Ardebil, Mr Djavadi insisted on coming to Tehran to pick me up and had only with great difficulty been dissuaded from doing so. Now, standing in front of his shop wearing a smart but ill-fitting suit, his fingers adorned with large rings, he had more the look of a local dignitary expecting to receive a government official than someone in the car business. I was formally welcomed by the whole family and within minutes was sitting at the back of the shop with a glass of fruit juice, listening to the customary social compliments about my family whilst shoppers rummaged through bins of spark plugs and drawers full of bolts. Very much the patriarch now, Mr Djavadi sat at the back of his shop holding forth whilst the younger Djavadis, all boys, scuttled around making a fuss over the two of us with friendly smiles for me and unwavering respect for the hajj agha (hajji being the honorific title given to those Muslims who have performed the Hajj to Mecca).
During our conversation I mentioned that I was keen to visit the mighty Mount Sabalan, described by Sir Roger Stevens as ‘the most haunting of all the mountains of Iran’. Before I knew it, I was rumbling through busy streets inside Mr Djavadi’s white Nissan Carryboy, watching the bustle that was Ardebil slide past the window. We drove west out of town towards the towering branch of the Alborz mountain range dominated by the near 5,000 metres of extinct, perennially snow-capped volcano that is Mount Sabalan. ‘It is not surprising,’ Stevens writes in Land of the Great Sophy, ‘that according to legend, Zoroaster compiled the Avesta on its summit; nor yet that Sheikh Seifuddin [sic] meditated at its base.’1
Sheikh Safi al-Din was a thirteenth-/fourteenth-century founder of a mystic order based in Ardebil. With the collapse of the Mongol Empire around it, this order grew from strength to strength, its leadership being passed down through Sheikh Safi’s bloodline. Amongst the followers of the order were a tribe of Turkoman origin renowned for their bravery and their savagery. These were the Qizilbash, named for the distinctive red headgear they wore, with twelve points representing the twelve Imams of orthodox Shi‘ism. Rumoured to have considered themselves invincible and to have indulged in cannibalism, they were feared warriors fanatically loyal to their sheikh, whom they viewed as benefitting from divine favour.
It was with the help of this semi-nomadic warrior tribe that, in 1501, the fourteen-year-old Ismail, descendant of Sheikh Safi, claimed the throne of Iran in Tabriz. By 1509 he had unified the country under his rule, establishing the Safavid dynasty. Although Twelver Shi‘ism had existed in little pockets of Iran for some time, it was Shah Ismail who declared it the official religion of the realm. This conversion to Shi‘ism was a calculated political move designed to make clear the division between Safavid territory and the Sunni Ottoman Caliphate looming to the west. This new faith was forced first upon Tabriz, a largely Sunni city, and then slowly and violently upon the rest of the country. Fearing for their lives, many Sunni scholars fled south to Arabia or west into Ottoman territory.
A large number of Shi‘i scholars came the other way, imported to Iran from Syria and South Lebanon (today’s Hezbollah stronghold) to help establish the new national faith by more peaceable means. It was the power granted to these jurists that set the precedent for the growing influence of religious figures in Shi‘i Iran and resulted in their being recognised as living representatives of the Imams. It was in the Qajar era, though, that the hierarchy of mojtaheds – a high-ranking group of religious scholars deemed sufficiently enlightened to interpret the hadith – became fully established and the titles of Hojjat-ol Eslam (Proof of Islam) and Ayatollah (Sign of God) came into being, the culmination of which is the Velayat-e Faqih (Guardianship of the Jurist), the system of Islamic governance conceived and implemented by Ayatollah Khomeini since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
Despite Shah Ismail’s aggressive tactics, Shi‘ism was not fully established as the nation’s faith until the reign of Shah Abbas I (1588–1629) and it was only at the end of the sixteenth century that Sunnism was, for the most part, eradicated in Iran.
* * *
The new Alvares ski area, developed on the foothills of Mount Sabalan and proudly but spuriously claiming to be north-western Iran’s largest resort, is perched in the vertiginous folds above Sarein. A once sleepy village, Sarein has recently metamorphosed into a thriving town thanks to the busloads of ailing, superstitious or simply curious tourists that flock there to bathe in its sulphurous springs. Dull, grey concrete skeletons herald yet more apartment blocks to join the disorderly jumble of hotels and holiday homes. The streets are awash with garish colour: burning neon signs and strings of coloured bulbs signalling restaurants and ice-cream parlours; multi-coloured beach balls emblazoned with Disney cartoon characters and the colours of every major European football team hang outside crammed shops waiting to ensnare the occasional hovering tourist.
The ‘vast ski area’ turned out to be one rickety two-man chairlift that might have seen better days in an Eastern European resort two generations earlier. But it was all enough to fill Mr Djavadi with wonder as he swept the air with his cigarette-holder to invoke suitable utterances of awe from me. The rusty chairlift creaked and groaned, heaving its empty chairs up the slope and down again past a moth-holed Iranian flag. My guide deftly twisted another cigarette into its waiting holder as he looked at me expectantly. ‘Incredible mountains,’ was all I could offer the ever-cheerful Mr Djavadi, who seemed to have discovered in the chairlift a source of great awe and pride.
We took a different road back through mud-walled villages, piles of straw stacked onto roofs next to menhirs of manure stockpiled to burn as fuel through the coming winter months, particularly harsh in these parts. The livestock-based mountain villages gave way to the fields and furrows of agricultural communities as we descended the mountain slopes. Much of the land we drove through belonged to the prolific Iranian footballer Ali Daei, a local who, rather improbably, holds the world record for international goals scored, ahead of such footballing juggernauts as Pelé, Ferenc Puskás and Maradona.
* * *
Despite my best efforts, Mr Djavadi thwarted all my attempts to pay for the various historical sites we visited and our lunch in Sarein. He had even arranged to pay for my room in the local guest-house unbeknown to me, batting away all my protests with a dismissive swipe of his cigarette-holder. I was a guest and that was the end of the matter. As we visited the fourteenth-century mausoleum of Sheikh Safi al-Din, known as the Allah-Allah on account of the repetition of God’s name adorning the sky-blue mosaic-work of the salt-cellar-shaped tomb, Mr Djavadi became subdued. Here, in the presence of a holy name from the history of Iran, he deemed it necessary to refrain from interjecting his own persona into the scene. Gone was the ebullience, the arm-waving and the cigarette-holder. Here Sheikh Safi must be allowed to rest undisturbed.
Mr Djavadi’s endlessly welcoming manner, his brushes of wit and his air of mannered authority were endearing. I was sad our encounter had to be so brief, but my schedule was unrelenting, so with an ‘Ensha’llah’ I promised I would return for a longer stay.
Ardebil had been described by al-Moqaddasi, the eleventh-century Arab geographer, as ‘one of the latrines of the world’, but with me the town had left a favourable impression. With a population of just over 350,000, its relatively small size made the place a poor cousin to Tabriz, the regional capital. Still, Ardebil, its streets littered with history and its people full of stony charm, watched over by the protective presence of Mount Sabalan, had managed to retain much of its original character.
* * *
Tabriz, the capital of East Azerbaijan province, lies some 220 kilometres due west of Ardebil. As I approached Tabriz and left the verdant Caspian shoreline further and further behind me, the landscape became increasingly arid. The picturesque green scenery gradually gave way to majestic near-desert splendour, decorated by dusty soft-brown fields sweeping down from the ever-present Alborz Mountains. Tabriz lies in an airy plain encircled by mountains and, as my savari wound through a final mountain pass, I caught a first glimpse of the industrial city. Having skirted its entire length on a ring road, we pulled into the mayhem of the main bus terminal. Rows of battered buses were surrounded by a swarm of rusting yellow cabs. The hubbub of raised voices yelling destinations, scolding children and arguing over fares was deafening. Even before I had pulled my backpack out of the trunk of the car, I was engulfed by stained shirts, sandals and moustaches pulling and poking me, haggling over prices with one another and attempting to swat away competition with a swipe of the tasbih prayer beads. The scrum for my custom was complicated by the (to my ears) strange sounds of Azeri Turkic. Here the Turkic dialect reigned supreme and Persian was spoken only grudgingly, as if to emphasise the distinctions of this part of Iran from its political centre of gravity, Tehran.
* * *
The early history of the city of Tabriz is opaque and, like much of Iran’s ancient history, tinged with mystery and myth. Historians believe that the earliest reference to the city can be found on a stone tablet dating back to the reign of the great Assyrian king, Sargon II (721–705 BCE). A Seljuk settlement may have come into being in the eleventh or twelfth century but Tabriz only really flourished as the seat of the Ilkhanid throne in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries following the Mongol invasions and again under the Safavids in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Situated at the north-western corner of Iran, at a point where many great empires of the past converged, the city has had a turbulent history littered with sackings and invasions. This, coupled with the region’s susceptibility to earthquakes, has ensured that nearly all of the city’s historical monuments have been destroyed. The Arg-e-Tabriz, a fourteenth-century brick citadel with two large arches, is one of the few to have survived but otherwise Tabriz is typical of so-called modern industrial cities in the developing world: architecturally soulless, ugly, built up with no vision other than securing the financial interests of low-grade developers.
It is for its recent history that Tabriz is better known these days, and for two very different episodes in Iran’s history. By the early twentieth century, Iranians, who had largely remained culturally and politically isolated from the rest of the world, were beginning to become aware that arbitrary absolute power was not the only way to organise the governance of a country. Notions of pluralism and accountability began to seep into the consciousness of the literate few who constituted the country’s elite – the merchants, the clergy and government officials – and who had access to Persian writings from abroad highly critical of the political order in the country. Exacerbated by memories of foreign commercial concessions granted for a paltry sum by Naser al-Din Shah in the late nineteenth century, and by resentment towards the quasi-colonial British and Russian interventions in the domestic affairs of Iran, the clamour for a constitutional reordering of the country’s politics grew rapidly. By 1905 public disapproval of Iran’s political order had resulted in protests culminating in the closure of Tehran’s bazaar. Mozafar al-Din Shah’s heavy-handed reaction, violating the sanctity of the mosque protesters had taken shelter in, only served to galvanise the dissidents and further alienate the general population.
The ageing Shah agreed to a constitution drawn up in 1906, after thousands of people camped out in the British Embassy’s gardens as a form of dramatic protest, but the old king died soon afterwards. His son, Mohammad Ali Shah, was less sympathetic to the constitutional cause and sought to wrest power back from the nascent parliament. In the summer of 1907, unrelated to these events, the British and Russians, now beginning to become concerned by growing German power, decided to end their rivalry in Asia. In this arrangement between these two great powers terminating ‘The Great Game’, Iran was divided into two ‘spheres of influence’: the Russian sphere to the north and the British sphere in the south, with a neutral buffer zone in the middle. This effective carving up of the country only stoked the flames of rebellion and strengthened the resolve of the reformists. In June 1908 the new Shah invited the leaders of the constitutional movement to a meeting, promptly arresting all but four of them in an effort to quash the uprising. This he followed by bombing the Majles, the seat of the newly formed government.
Fighting soon broke out in pockets across the country, but it was in Tabriz where the battle to end the institution of absolute monarchy was fought, an institution that claims to stretch back as far as recorded history in Iran. An unlikely hero of the Constitutional Revolution was a man named Sattar Khan. This mercurial figure rose to local prominence as a brigand before joining the armed guard of Crown Prince Mozafar al-Din, before the latter became shah. Sattar had soon grown weary of his official duties and reverted to brigandage. But a devout Shi‘a and now politically incensed, he marched to Tehran to defend the Majles against the monarchist troops, fighting a tyrannous king in the name of social justice – always a powerful incentive among Shi‘i Muslims.
As the fighting continued to escalate back in his native north-west, Sattar Khan was quick to leave the capital and return to help the rebels of his hometown. Tabriz underwent an eleven-month siege in which Sattar established himself as a folk hero, famously scurrying through the besieged streets of the city removing the white flags of surrender that his fellow constitutionalists had raised at a particularly dispirited, hunger-stricken point in the stand-off. It was thanks to his bravery and recalcitrance that the constitutional cause survived the siege. After the abdication of Mohammad Ali Shah in July 1909, Sattar Khan was made governor of Ardebil, a post which he resigned two months later. His fame and success were reputed to have gone to his head and, despite his privileged position, he frequently indulged in often violent drinking bouts and turned to his favoured pastime of brigandage.
Sattar Khan, who has become an Iranian cult hero, embodies two defining traits in Iranian culture. The first is that of the archetypal Shi‘i underdog hero fighting for social justice against a tyrannical figure or institution. The other most Iranian of traits is the incongruity found in his character: a devout Muslim with a weakness for alcohol; a champion of the people with a penchant for banditry; a proclaimer of the popular will with autocratic tendencies. From an Iranian’s romantic, metaphysical point of view these characteristics are not contradictory, simply human. Rather than the clear-cut Islamic sense of right and wrong, the Iranian psyche still tends towards a more forgiving, flexible, Zoroastrian interpretation of the human condition where good deeds and evil deeds are weighed against one another in deciding an individual’s eternal fate.
* * *
Another even more unlikely hero of the Constitutional Revolution was a young Nebraskan missionary born in 1885. In 1907, Howard Baskerville, a Princeton graduate, was sent to the Presbyterian school in Tabriz as a teacher. Swept up by the fervour and progressive vision of the reformist movement, Baskerville joined the constitutionalists in 1908. He was soon the leader of a militia of 150 people fighting to break the siege that was strangling the life out of the rebel city. On 19 April 1909, aged just twenty-four, Baskerville was shot through the heart by a monarchist sharpshooter. His body is buried in the Christian Armenian cemetery in Tabriz and his contribution to a movement that was fundamental to shaping the modern era in Iran is commemorated with a bronze bust in the city’s Constitution House. ‘The only difference between me and these people,’ Baskerville said, in a statement with particular poignancy for my own situation, ‘is my place of birth, and this is not a big difference.’
* * *
The second episode which propelled Tabriz into the centre of modern Iranian history occurred immediately after World War II, when Iran became a flashpoint in the lead-up to the Cold War. At the start of World War II, Iran had declared itself neutral. The then king, Reza Shah Pahlavi, was unwilling to back the Allies, which would have been an unpopular move given the anti-British resentment at the country’s continued interference in Iranian affairs. At the same time, to have backed the Germans would have been foolhardy given Britain’s continuing influence in Iran and its control of the country’s oil industry. In 1941, following the Soviet and US entry into the war, it was essential for the Allied war effort that a supply corridor into the Soviet Union be created. Iran was the obvious choice. So on 25 August 1941, British and Soviet troops invaded the country, summarily deposed Reza Shah, sending him into exile, and installed his son, Mohammad Reza Shah, a young man of just twenty-one, as his successor. For the remaining four years of the war, the British and the Soviets dominated the affairs of the country with a nominally independent Iranian government supposedly in charge.
With the end of World War II, the British and Americans withdrew the bulk of their forces from Iran. The Soviets did not. Instead, they backed the independence movement in Tabriz that, in November 1945, declared the province of Azerbaijan separate from the central government in Tehran and installed Jafar Pishevari, an Azeri Turk born in Khalkhal and founder of the Communist Party of Iran, as its prime minister. This was to be the first of many confrontations between the Soviet Union and the West over the next several years. The US government, keen to test the effectiveness of the nascent United Nations in the ‘maintenance of international peace and security’, appealed to the UN Security Council, which, on 30 January 1946, passed Resolution 2 declaring the continuing Soviet military presence in Iran illegal. It took two more official complaints, lodged by Iran and supported by the USA, to result in Resolutions 3 (4 April 1946) and 5 (8 May 1946), for Stalin, who had used the occasion to probe Western determination to uphold the post-World War II settlements agreed at the conferences in Tehran (1943), Yalta (February 1945) and Potsdam (July 1945), to get his answer and pull back Soviet troops. As a result, the Pishevari government in Tabriz collapsed, he and his cabinet fled to the Soviet Union and Tabriz’s brief moment in the international political sun came to an end.
* * *
From Constitution House I headed to the bazaar. Originally built in the eleventh century but largely rebuilt in the fifteenth, it had a high vaulted-brick roof and arches suspended above narrow alleyways awash with activity that linked the various caravanserais and mosques in its environs. The buzz and movement had the feel of an ant colony perpetually in motion. Old men, as threadbare as their tattered clothes, hauled hefty cartfuls of carpets and other wares, rumbling over the cobbled ground, whilst the younger, visibly more prosperous stall-owners put their imitation-Gucci-shod feet up and watched little television sets with clothes-hangers as makeshift aerials. A customer’s query would be answered with an uninterested nod or nonchalant gesture without a break from the gaze on the screen. Every now and again the aroma of grilled lamb or liver would waft along the warren of alleyways, drifting over the clothes, carpets, sacks of nuts and colourful herbs and spices of the stalls.
* * *
The day had been unexpectedly hot and the night was delightfully mild. I had noticed plenty of fruit juice bars and ice-cream parlours along the obligatory Imam Khomeini Street a short walk from my hotel. After dark, similar establishments in Tehran would be teeming with packs of adolescents and students busily flirting, frolicking and exchanging phone numbers. But here in Tabriz the white plastic chairs and tables were empty. In search of some verve, I decided to take a half-hour taxi ride to Elgoli, an affluent suburb of the city housing a luxury hotel, theme park and large artificial lake. I was dropped off at a large square swirling with traffic. Rough-looking youths lay languidly across the bonnets of Paykans, talking, laughing and smoking while stands offered a variety of street food. The place was busy, but noticeably different from Tehran was the relative absence of young women. The laughs, the jokes, the banter all came from clusters of young men. Provincial Tabriz obviously seemed a step or two behind metropolitan Tehran and its devil-may-care youth culture.
The flaring lights and wailing music of a fairground beckoned to me and I walked around in search of an entrance. I noticed an open gateway leading to a large hut-like structure and wandered in. The place was filled with men in scruffy suits and a few women in full-length black chadors. Then I noticed the closely-shorn, khaki-clad figures of soldiers distractedly tapping their bulky black boots to the martial music being piped through a PA system. The men, with their suits and tell-tale beards of Iranian officialdom, together with their wives were staring intently at life-sized posters of Khomeini, Gaddafi and Arafat. Here and there were images of Uncle Sam being crushed in the fist of a Revolutionary Guard or a John Bull being kicked in the balls by a machine-gun-toting chadori woman. Along one wall a bank of screens flickered with the all-too-familiar black-and-white images of the Revolution, along with the large banners brandishing anti-imperialist, anti-American slogans, the largest of which read (loosely translated): America Can’t Do a Damned Thing (Amrica hich ghalati nemikhore). I had unintentionally stumbled into an exhibition celebrating the successes of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Having spent some moments respectfully admiring the images on display, I slipped out and came across a staircase leading up to a series of softly-lit walkways winding around an artificial lake that dated from the Safavid era. Little clusters of youth, again mostly boys, perched on benches or ambled along the walkways as colourfully lit fountains cascaded into the rippling water. I could hear the neon noise of the Lunapark over the fence but I was now more drawn to the open-air restaurant. A bowl of ash-e-dough (a very tasty kind of hot yoghurt soup) later and I was reclining on a takht, enjoying the smooth comfort of a ghalyan water pipe washed down with piping hot tea as birds chattered in the cool night air.
The journey back into town was given a bizarre twist when my young cab driver decided to bring a friend along for company. His friend, who by my count possessed no more than two teeth, was already in the passenger seat with his seatbelt fastened before I realised what was going on. Sticking his head out of the open passenger window, he would let out a loud, lupine yelp at every passing car. Each time he yelped the cab driver would land a playful but firm smack on the back of his head before giving his earlobe a tug. When we arrived at my hotel and I paid the fare there was no explanation, or even mention, of the young man. The driver thanked me, his companion smiled and off they went. As I watched them disappear into the distance I saw the friend’s head pop out of the passenger window and howl loudly up at the moon as a hand reached out and yanked him back in by the earlobe.
The following morning I awoke early, packed up my gear and headed downstairs sheepishly to ask whether breakfast was being served. It was the first day of the month of Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting and I had no real idea what to expect. Even the less religious element of Iranian society simply pay heed not to smoke, drink or eat in public until after the evening call to prayer: the closed and curtained doors and windows of every teahouse and restaurant, the threat of a fine or flogging from the police or, worse still, a beating at the hands of an irate Basiji act as effective deterrents. Travellers, I had a vague notion, were within their rights to break the fast for the duration of their journey but I was not sure exactly how this would apply to me. To my relief, I was served tea and eggs without a fuss and was soon back on the road. I had again opted for a dar bast savari (private taxi) so that I could visit the village of Kandovan, an hour’s detour from my route to Lake Orumiyeh. This would allow me to take the ferry across the middle of the lake rather than the longer, less picturesque bus route around its northerly shores.
* * *
The turning off the main road to Orumiyeh led through sleepy little villages of old men in misshapen, discoloured jumpers and hardened women wrapped in colourful, floral-patterned chadors, through their leafy fruit and nut groves and out onto a fertile plain irrigated by the melt-water of the Sahand Mountains. Mount Sahand itself is an inverted pudding-bowl shape and its outline was beautifully silhouetted against the unblemished blue sky. In his book Legend, David Rohl postulates that this may have been the biblical Mountain of God in the book of Genesis, a theory in line with many a scholarly opinion that the Garden of Eden is located somewhere in the region.
Kandovan is a small village hewn from the fantastical natural rock formations of the very mountain on whose stony side it rests. Stalagmitic ovals reach up from the mountainside like a forest of menhir-like rocks. Homes have been hewn into every one of these menhirs, each with a sky-blue metal door. Some historians believe that these troglodytic dwellings were first used as shelters by soldiers on military campaigns over 800 ago, although archaeologists have suggested that pre-Islamic, possibly even prehistoric settlements existed in the area. These cave-like abodes were scattered around the steep, scraggy slope that somehow served as streets cluttered with cats, clucking chickens and the odd village woman cowering behind her chador at the sight of a camera as she went about her daily chores. As I clambered between the tall rocks, a woman emerged from her home and gave me a stern rebuke for taking pictures of her front garden. ‘Can you not see this is someone’s private garden?’ she bellowed, gesturing at the metre-wide strip of rubble on which I was struggling to keep my footing.
The teahouse sold locally produced honey, nuts and bottles of supposedly healing water from the village’s spring. ‘Especially good for kidney stones,’ the shopkeeper insisted, pointing to his stomach. A busy clanging came from the next-door construction site; a luxury hotel was being built in the mountainside. The most startling of this primitive village’s little quirks was the web of black electrical wire that ran from the top of one rock-dwelling to the next and the obligatory antenna that jutted clumsily out beside it. Nearly every one of these caves, no bigger than 2.5 metres in diameter, one naked bulb dangling from a ceiling like an incandescent stalactite, a hearth-stead as a kitchen and a hearth-rug as the only piece of furniture, had a television.
* * *
The westerly road leading to Orumiyeh was a two-lane strip of asphalt that stretched through the middle of an immense, boggy basin encircled by the brooding volcanic rock of the westerly Alborz range. Only a few years earlier the plain we were driving over had been a small lake. A fractional but seemingly permanent climate change in the region leading to lower rainfall and a marginal increase in temperature had caused this lake simply to evaporate. ‘It was God’s will,’ said my taxi driver through a thick, silver moustache. Once out of the plain, the road swung around the base of the low mountains to reveal the brilliant white shores of Lake Orumiyeh shimmering in the sunlight. The level of salinity of the lake is too high to sustain anything but primitive crustaceans. This is due to the lack of any outlets for the many radial, salt-bearing streams that feed into it. Like the Dead Sea, it is indeed dead to life. The lake is 140 kilometres long and 55 kilometres wide at its broadest point but across its narrow, pinched neck a bridge was under construction. ‘They’ve been building it for twenty years,’ said the taxi driver. ‘It will never be finished. It is God’s will.’
The short drive between Lake Orumiyeh’s western shore and the town itself was lined with fragrant, walled gardens exploding with mulberry, pomegranate and cherry trees. It was a relief to have left the 2-million-strong sprawl of Tabriz behind for what seemed like an attractive town of manageable proportions. When I said as much to the hitherto laconic driver, he exploded in a diatribe of abuse at the city authorities, their ineptitude, their unwillingness to produce low-cost housing, their corruption and their lack of any qualification for even existing on this earth. ‘It is God’s will,’ I ventured.
Having been enchanted by the glistening white shoreline of the lake and notwithstanding the ills of the city fathers, I decided to spend a night in Orumiyeh, the supposed birthplace of the prophet Zoroaster. The precise date of his birth is, as previously mentioned, the subject of much debate amongst historians and academics, with anything from 600 BCE to 1800 BCE having been proposed in recent times. It had long been assumed that much of the mystery and confusion surrounding the prophet Zoroaster’s dates and origins had stemmed from the fact that his teachings were passed down through oral tradition for many centuries, only being transcribed by the Magian priesthood as late as the fifth century CE. These records had been the basis of much modern research into the era, but it is only recently that historians have unearthed certain glaring inconsistencies that suggest a somewhat more creative cataloguing of the religion’s early history in an effort to legitimise the Magian priesthood of the Sasanian era’s interpretation of the ancient faith.
Despite his disputed origins, Zoroaster in different ways and at different times gave ancient Persia its religion before the arrival of Islam in the seventh century. The Zoroastrian faith, often erroneously misconstrued as fire worship, sees the world as organised between two poles: good and evil, light and dark, fire and earth. As such it is not unrelated to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic notions of God and Satan; the essence of good living being to secure as much positivity in life as possible in the face of temptation and negative impulses. It is a religion well suited to an Iranian temperament which values flexibility and discourse. Many an Iranian, though true to the precepts of Shi‘i Islam, expresses a longing for the true Persian spirit as reflected in Zoroastrianism.
Orumiyeh proved a town full of surprises. Its position at the delta of converging civilisations was evident in its ethnic makeup of Anatolian Turks, Azeri Turks, Armenians and Assyrians; even the odd Kurd could be seen walking proudly around sporting his characteristic tasselled turban, cummerbund and baggy trousers. The town is divided into ethnic neighbourhoods; some, like the Armenian area, tangibly more affluent. Well-groomed pedestrian shopping streets housed faux-designer boutiques, internet cafés and electrical goods retailers which nudged up against the metalworkers’ bazaar nearby, with its incessant hammering on copper bowls and silver dishes. On every corner dates, sweet bread, tea and various other traditional eftar foods were doing a roaring trade. Eftar, the break of the fast at dusk, is a festive time in which the family and the community in general, so important in the Islamic tradition, come together for the first meal of the day. Restaurants and the odd random house handed out steaming cups full of ash soup to passers-by – a custom that lasts the duration of the month throughout the country and the Islamic community as a whole.
* * *
The following morning I set off straight for the busy alleyways of the bazaar, amassing all I needed for a long-overdue night or two under canvas. My spirits were dampened on arrival at Lake Orumiyeh with the discovery that the western shoreline of the lake was noticeably different from its eastern counterpart. The desolate black rock and crystalline salt beaches had given way to a small, uninhabited village in front of which lay a vast boggy wasteland. The road running through the village was bordered with large rectangular enclosures in which tens of thousands of white grapes had been spread on white sheets and left in the sun to slowly shrivel into raisins.
An impossible wind whipped salty specks up from the surface of the lake and into my eyes. A few pathways spread off the road, leading to a large, blue water tank on stilts, a little workman’s hut and an unlikely car-park with two Paykan cars and their three passengers who seemed to be mining salt. The grey surface-layer of salt and mud gave under foot in places, like thin ice, plunging my shoes into deeper mud. These were no conditions in which to pitch a tent. Having watched my taxi drive off into the distance, I blew about in the wind, shielding my eyes, scratching my head and wondering what I was going to do. On the drive over I had noticed a cluster of buildings further up the shoreline. With a slow, wind-beaten plod, I set off in their direction hoping to find shelter, or at the very least a telephone to call for a ride back to town, my mobile phone predictably out of service. The cluster of buildings I had spotted turned out to be a couple of hotels.
The Flamingo was a far cry from its Las Vegas namesake but it was the smartest hotel I had come across thus far. The lights were off and the place was empty but the door was unlocked. As I barged into a grand but gloomy reception hall I startled a body slumped over the reception desk into life. Outside, packs of wild dogs lolled shaggily around as tumbleweed blew across the deserted streets. ‘You wouldn’t believe we were full just over a week ago, would you?’ the receptionist said after exchanging the customary greetings, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. It was hard to imagine the lifeless foyer and deserted sweeping staircase anything but eerily empty. A bin rattled incessantly against its metal frame in the wind outside. This, I was informed, was a government hotel and therefore stayed open all year round to cater to the odd passing delegation and the occasional conference. The rest of the area only opened for the summer period popular with tourists and in the spring for the flocks of ornithologists drawn to the lake by the annual invasion of migratory birds. A raucous guffaw met explanations of my intention to camp. ‘You would have woken up on the lake bed,’ he snorted before giving me a bargain price for a veela, a small self-catering bungalow I was grateful to take shelter in.
* * *
Having shaken the salt out of my hair and eyes, I laid a spread of tomatoes, cucumbers, bread and goat’s cheese on the floor and washed it down with a pot of tea which the by now fully awake caretaker brought me. After this simple meal, I grabbed my camera and a bottle of water and wandered out into the howling wind and empty streets, the occasional plastic bottle rattling across the asphalt. Following the shoreline, I came across a road that led to a big blue water tank elevated on two concrete breeze-blocks. ‘Hot water shower’ read the unlikely hand-written scrawl under a rusty showerhead poking from its side. Next to this, six or seven metal frames resembling goalposts were scattered around. Long strips of tawny fabric danced and flickered from them in the gale; these threadbare ribbons all that was left of what, in a previous incarnation, were awnings providing shelter from the sun.
As I wandered along this desolate, wind-swept landscape, I came across an empty open-air stadium planted, for no apparent reason, in this middle-of-nowhere. I clambered silently around the empty seats bathed in soft afternoon sunlight. Closing my eyes, I tried to imagine a roaring crowd but the scene was too unlikely in the lonely silence broken only by the soft howl of the wind. I made my way back to the lakeshore in time to catch a slow, smouldering sunset, admiring the little pools and rivulets that burned in the mud with golden reflections of the dwindling sun. Flocks of small white birds swept low over the salty basin. Bright pinks and explosive oranges seemed to burst out from a solitary cloud that hung shrouding the sun as if only to enhance the view.
Sitting in that glorious desolation, mountains on all sides – some near, some just visible in the twilight over the far side of the lake – a little bubbling pool of mud between me and the inky blue waters, it was impossible not to be at once exhilarated and humbled by my natural surroundings.
But the exhilaration did not last long. In the fast-fading light, thick swarms of mosquitoes began to buzz in the air like menacing predators. There were so many that I was forced to snort and spit them out of my mouth as I ran back to the hotel manically slapping myself as I went. When I arrived back at the bungalow I was horrified to discover that I had left the light on. The glass door was alive with thousands upon thousands of mosquitoes. Trying to shoo them off would be disastrous so I braced myself, opened the door just enough to squeeze through and slammed it behind me as fast as I could, but not fast enough to prevent a thick, buzzing cloud spilling in behind me. The next hour was spent frantically chasing around the room, swiping a rolled up notebook to and fro. Hitchcock and his birds had nothing on me.
The following morning, with the clouds of mosquitoes gone, I wandered over to the reception area to find that the caretaker had prepared a breakfast of bread and cheese and was brewing up a pot of tea. The television set in the dining area was tuned into a cleric taking questions from callers about correct Ramadan procedures. A young man from Kerman rang in to ask about the acceptable way to burp during the holy month. ‘You must exhale the burp,’ intoned the priest. ‘To re-swallow the gassy emanation is consumption and is therefore a violation of your sacred fast.’ More questions followed about defecation, fornication and the accidental swallowing of a fly during Ramadan, a question very pertinent to my experience of the previous night. Each inquiry was followed by the stony-faced yet kindly response of the mullah, who treated every questioner as a curious and well-behaved child worthy of a pat on the head.