Memories of Iran

By Luke Heilbuth

On the road to mythical Alamut

Climbing slowly away from Tehran's grimy outer ring, the road snakes up and up, leaving the dead, spinifexed foothills of the Alborz behind. Then with suddenness the mountain's spine is broken and through the jagged breach lies a chain of seemingly endless hills and valleys, flower-filled and impossibly green. Clusters of trees gather conspiratorially around streams in the low-lying gullies, while above massive snow-capped mountains soar into the Persian sky. We stop for coffee from the thermos on a hill filled with yellow flowers and grasshoppers.

A barbarous war

Some 500,000 Iranians died following Saddam Hussein's 1980 invasion. Like Gallipoli writ-large, Iranians try to make sense of the pointless loss of young life by glorifying the fallen as martyrs. This chilling paragraph is from Hitchens:

"During the Iran-Iraq War, the Ayatollah Khomeini imported 500,000 small plastic keys from Taiwan. The trinkets were meant to be inspirational. After Iraq invaded in September, 1980, it had quickly become clear that Iran's forces were no match for Saddam Hussein's professional, well-armed military. To compensate for their disadvantage, Khomeini sent Iranian children, some as young as 12 years old, to the front lines. There, they marched in formation across minefields toward the enemy, clearing a path with their bodies. Before every mission, one of the Taiwanese keys would be hung around each child's neck. It was supposed to open the gates to paradise for them."

Persian hospitality

Iranians are incredibly warm, friendly people; delighted to have the rare chance to meet a foreigner - any foreigner. Walking the nation's streets and meeting the locals is a real pleasure.

Thus spoke Zarathustra

It was really hot that day in the desert, and we climbed to the top of the ancient Zoroastrian funeral site on the hill, where the dead were once left to be picked clean by vultures. Zoroastrianism was the original religion of Persia before the country was converted to Islam. Sadly, less than 20,000 adherents remain.

The silk road

It's sunset now at Caravanserai Zein-o-Diin, a 400-year rest stop on a lonely stretch of the silk road. Small birds are flitting on the relieving wind. The day has become half-hearted and its final hours are defined not by its heat, but by its light. A truck-laden highway rolls out into the distance, but otherwise the desert is an empty vessel, cupped on both sides by prodigious hills that curve around the plain like fingers. The sun and the shadows have turned them shades of brown and red, and each crag is set against the sky in permanence.

Hafez the beautiful

Contrary to popular belief, Iranians are a sensual, fun-loving people, and the Sufi mystic poet Hafez (a medieval Persian Shakespeare who wrote of love and wine) is the national hero. His tomb is as popular a pilgrimage as any Islamic site; well-wishers throw flowers and snippets of his poetry under the pergola.

The sky / Is a suspended blue ocean / The stars are the fish / That swim.

The planets are the white whales / I sometimes hitch a ride on / And the sun and all light / Have forever fused themselves / Into my heart and upon / My skin.

There is only one rule / On this Wild Playground / For every sign Hafez has ever seen / Reads the same.

They all say, / "Have fun, my dear; my dear, have fun / In the Beloved's Divine Game / O, in the Beloved's Wonderful Game.

In the court of Kings

Persepolis, the ancient Persian capital, is 2,500 years old. Here stands the monumental Gate of All Nations, where the vassal kings of the Persian Empire would come to bow down before Darius the Great, or as he modestly referred to himself, 'The King of Kings'.

Half of the world

Esfahan is a city of gardens that rolls across a fertile plain, hemmed in on one side by the barren hills so characteristic of the country. It is as if the various folklorists of the 1001 Nights fashioned some fantastic trick to bring all your most romantic notions of the medieval Orient to 21st Century reality. I half expect to see Jasmine and Aladdin picnicking beside a poplar tree.

Eating in the evening in the courtyard of Esfahan's Abbasid Hotel, with its fountains, flowers and profusion of artfully set lamps, where smiling locals come forward to enquire about our origins and thoughts on Iran; where hejabs are worn on the back of the neck and nowhere else by the cat-eyed immaculately dressed glitterati; where tea is taken in long, elegant glasses with a shaving of treacle-like sugar - I can scarcely imagine that I am in modern Iran.

The family business

In the Esfahan souk, master craftsmen still practice the same skills as their ancestors. The old man is a master dyer, his grandson sold us a Persian carpet and a beautiful Islamic prayer mat.

Mashallah

As I read the entrance sign in dodgy English claiming Sheikh Lotfollah to be the world's most 'baeutiful Islamic place of worshup', you could forgive me for my scepticism. The mosque is accessed by a dingy stone passage, which twists around to the left so that the mihrab (an altar-like feature in all mosques which helps the believer pray in the direction of Mecca) is lined up correctly. Even in the gloom, I could make out a strange green light coming from the tunnel's end. Mashallah! Is this the most beautiful building in the world? There are moments, memories in life, that no camera can capture, that no later conversation can accurately relate.

Entering its portal, I was literally overwhelmed by beauty. The shock of what lay in front of me left me slack-jawed and gulping. Tears formed in my eyes. A dome, at once intimate and massive, climbed heavenward in perfect proportion, made up of a bedazzling array of green tiles and artfully placed windows that bathed the whole holy place in green, like some kind of ceramic forest. A belt of verses from the Qu'ran separated this from the bottom strata, which was blue, and featured hundreds of tiles glazed in flowers, vines and plants.