At 2pm today the Iranian New Year festival of No Ruz officially kicks off. It's a huge deal here--sort of Christmas and New Year's rolled into one--and lasts for about two weeks. During these two weeks, Iranians travel all over the country visiting relatives and doing the sorts of things intensely social creatures like to do with one another. Which makes it a special time to be in Iran but also a less-than-ideal time from a travel perspective (but if you only have one free month to visit Iran, you take the chance) since long-distance travel and accommodation gets heavily booked. One reason I visited Isfahan first is that major tourist destinations also get filled up during No Ruz. The plan for the coming week-and-a-bit is to get off the beaten track a little before hitting up Shiraz and other tourist hot spots in early April. But in the meantime, I have a bit of a quandary: I'm supposed to get back to Tehran today but the buses all seem to be booked. There seem still to be a few possibilities I might try, but I might also be in Isfahan longer than I intended. Luckily Mohsen is a supremely gracious host and is making me feel the opposite of needing to get out of his hair, but even so, I'd like to get out of his hair and continue the journey.
But the last couple days in Isfahan have been truly epic. I hope I can do them justice. Let's try.
Yesterday morning I went in to town to meet Gol Furush (I'll give her this name since it's Farsi for "flower seller"), a little crackerjack of a teenager who contacted me on couchsurfing.org after I'd already accepted the invitation from Mohsen (you can make your requests for a couch public, in which case other people in the area can find you). Like me, she's new to couchsurfing, and actually had to lie about her age to get on (minimum age is 18 and she's 17). And she stole my heart immediately--no, not in that way (shame on you), but I don't think I've ever developed a paternal concern for someone so quickly in my life. She has a gentle vivacity to her and an almost British sense of absurdity that lights up her entire face when she smiles. As you might imagine from a 17 year-old who treks in from out of town alone to meet a foreign stranger, she's mature beyond her years and is pretty much the only person here who I feel has really taken an interest in me as simply another human being rather than as some sort of pet or novelty item. (This isn't to say that other people have treated me only as a pet or novelty item, but I generally feel like I'm on display here--and when I travel generally--and it's a public me that people encounter and want to get to know rather than the "real" me: I too often feel I'm representing myself rather than being myself.) She's in her last year of school, and was admitted to the top school in Isfahan on the basis of her math skills, but she professes to hate math, and unlike most of her peers--and against the wishes of her parents--has no desire to go to university either. Her real ambition is to be a florist: she's most happy when she's tending to flowers and wants to make that her life. And, like every young, educated Iranian I've met, her other ambition is to get out of Iran. She has an uncle in Amsterdam who might be able to help her get there to train at a flower academy (as I learned in Ethiopia, the Netherlands are the global nerve centre of the cut flower trade), but she's a bit apprehensive about it because she doesn't know him very well and doesn't want to be so thoroughly dependent on a near-stranger in a foreign country.
So we spent our morning visiting the Masjed-e Sheikh Lotfollah and the Hasht Behesht Palace. The Masjed-e Sheikh Lotfollah is the other mosque in Nashq-e Jahan Square besides the massive Masjed-e Shah, which I visited the previous day. This one is much more modest in scale, but with a grace that compares favourably with the larger one. I complained in the previous blog entry about being overwhelmed by the treasures of Nashq-e Jahan Square, feeling inadequate to the task of taking them all in. I think at least a small part of that overwhelmed feeling was that I was too much in tourist mode, moving from one place to the next at too fast a pace. It's a further tribute to Gol Furush that her idea of a good time involved just sitting inside the Masjed-e Sheikh Lotfollah and chatting quietly for an hour as we slowly soaked it in. It's still simply too too much, but I felt over that hour that the overwhelmed feeling gave way to peace to some degree, and that that mosque disclosed some of its secrets to my more patient eye. It also helped that there genuinely was peace in the mosque: we were never alone, but there were never more than a half dozen other people in there with us. It's one of the things that's mind-blowing about being in Isfahan: if these buildings were in Paris or Rome they'd be packed to the gills (to the tops of the minarets?) and the sound pollution of clicking cameras and gee-whiz inanities would be such that it would be impossible to hear yourself think, let alone find the kind of peace that stills thought. But because I'm in Iran, I see only a handful of foreign tourists and have these magnificent treasures mostly to myself.
The next stop was the Hasht Behesht Palace, which is situated in the middle of a leafy park not far from Nashq-e Jahan Square, and gave me a strong feeling for how nice it must have been to be shah. The interior is fairly damaged, but it still gives the impression of gracious luxury.
For lunch, Gol Furush and I wandered down to the dry riverbed of the Zayandeh River--I've heard different reports, but it seems some combination of little precipitation and damming works has turned the major river that cuts through Isfahan into a beige smear of dust. Which is a pity on a number of levels, not least of which is that the river is straddled by a number of remarkable bridges, which now stand there like lost children, full of life but unsure what to do with themselves. Nevertheless, we trekked across the central bridge--Pol e Si-o-Seh (my Farsi is at least good enough that I can tell you that Si-o-Seh means "thirty-three," although I'm not sure why the bridge has this name)--which looks like a miniature Roman aqueduct, and met Gol Furush's English tutor for lunch. He lived in the US as a child and speaks the fluent-yet-fumbling English of someone with lots of exposure to the language but none recently. After lunch in an exquisite traditional restaurant (Isfahan seems to do these things well), he wanted to show me the apartment complex he used to manage (I'd said I wanted to see the Masjed-e Jameh, but sometimes the host takes strange prerogatives) where we happily ran into an old friend of his and spent an hour sitting in his very swank apartment drinking tea and appreciating his toy car collection.
By mid/late afternoon I was back at Mohsen's for the next leg of Iranian hospitality. As I mentioned in the previous blog entry, Mohsen is a computer and Photoshop nerd, and had invited round his guru from Isfahan University. Except in Iran, "invite round" means inviting round the entire extended family (something like ten adults and three young children), and half of them spend the night at your place before moving on. The party was in full swing when I arrived and soon moved out for an evening stroll through Nashq-e Jahan Square before settling in to dinner at Bon Appetit, which is a charmingly enthusiastic imitation of a semi-upscale burger-and-pizza chain in the American fashion (they even had Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons playing on a TV screen). The guru, let's call him Mohammed, is a really lovely man who matches Gol Furush in his capacity to make a genuine connection with me. He has a gentle manner and a generous smile, and is wonderfully attentive to others. To take just one example, back at Mohsen's later in the evening, he noticed that I was a bit out of place in the mostly Farsi chat and roped me and another guy into a round robin tournament of backgammon (which I lost resoundingly). It wasn't just that he found a way to engage me (his English isn't bad, but it's halting), but he did so in a way that made me a part of the party rather than singling me out for pitying attention. He also has a PhD in psychology and teaches both psychology and digital arts at the university. Right now he's struggling with a tempting offer from the university in Mashhad, which would be a good career move but would take him far from family and the places he loves. Familiar academic dilemmas even in Iran.
The next morning I finally managed to get out to the Masjed-e Jameh, which is Iran's largest mosque, and which predates the Safavid treasures of Nashq-e Jahan Square. The oldest bits of the mosque date back to the 11th century efforts of Seljuk Turks, but part of the interest of the place is that it had various phases of construction (and destruction) and so also features elements from the Mongol period of domination as well as the later Safavids. I went alone, and the experience of the Masjed-e Sheikh Lotfollah the previous day inclined me to take it more slowly. I eventually settled in the north iwan, surrounded by geometrical patterns and highly stylized calligraphic inscriptions, and sat there for a good long time looking out on to the courtyard and the soaring minarets of the south iwan. As I soaked it all in, I noticed one significant aspect of Islam's interdiction on depicting the human form, and its consequent emphasis on geometrical patterning and elaborate calligraphy. In a church, my visual experience is intense and focused, where I'm drawn to images of Christ and the saints and I see--and only see--the story I'm being presented with. In a mosque there's no guiding image to focus the gaze upon, and so the visual experience is more diffuse: my eyes wander up and down, back and forth, almost mesmerized, but never settling on a single point of artistic emphasis. And that visual experience is tremendously soothing, broadening my visual experience and making it holistic rather than focused. To borrow vocabulary from the Buddhist tradition, you might say it prompts greater mindfulness. I can see why Islam has a strong (albeit controversial) tradition of mysticism.
Hassan had wanted to take me up Soffeh Mountain, which stands a little outside Isfahan, but for various logistical reasons we didn't have time to make the hike to the top, but instead took in the view over Isfahan from the park near the base of the mountain with a couple of his cousins. I then had a couple hours to shower, shave, and unwind a little before heading out for the evening's festivities.
The last Tuesday night before No Ruz is Chahar Shanbe-soori, a big celebration to see out the old year and see in the new. The main feature of the festival involves jumping over a bonfire to bring in good luck for the coming year, an Iranian custom that pre-dates Islam and is mildly disapproved of by the state. And if the "when in Rome" principle applied to feeding wild hyenas in Ethiopia, it certainly applies to jumping over a bonfire in Iran. The various couchsurfers I've met in the last few days (minus Gol Furush, who isn't part of that scene) all congregated in a courtyard house on the outskirts of town. It felt like a weird combination of an illegal rave and a high school party where someone's illicitly raided the parents' liquor cabinet (don't worry, mom and dad, this wasn't something I did in high school). It's forbidden for men and women to congregate like this at all, let alone dance together and other such things. There was even a secret stash of alcohol. As Hassan explained to me earlier in the day, "in Iran, everything is forbidden, and we do everything." The dancing mostly involved Iranian pop, but with frequent interruptions of Gangnam Style. It was a jolly gathering of mostly young people, but also a number of older folk and even some children. It's strange to think that what feels like a fairly tame party can count as subversive in Iran, but I was given a sharp reminder of this when the party broke up abruptly around 11pm when word got out that the police were coming. There was a mad dash for cars and we all screeched out into the night.
One feature of the party that made it feel more high school than illegal rave was the way that so much of the humour among the guys involves twelve-year-old sex and homosexuality jokes. A consequence of being over-sexed and under-sex-educated, I suppose. But I imagine it's also a feature of living in a regime that treats you like unruly adolescents: you maintain the role into adulthood. I suppose there's also the fact that in an economy that offers unpromising prospects to its educated youth, there's an extended adolescence of depending on one's parents and not being sure what one's going to do with one's life. I have no idea what that's like.
A couple nights ago I remembered that the flip flops I was wearing, which I'd bought in Oxford a couple years ago, were billed as Israeli military issue (I was just interested in them being cheap and durable, and they've been both). Fortunately any evidence of their provenance has long since worn off.
But the last couple days in Isfahan have been truly epic. I hope I can do them justice. Let's try.
Yesterday morning I went in to town to meet Gol Furush (I'll give her this name since it's Farsi for "flower seller"), a little crackerjack of a teenager who contacted me on couchsurfing.org after I'd already accepted the invitation from Mohsen (you can make your requests for a couch public, in which case other people in the area can find you). Like me, she's new to couchsurfing, and actually had to lie about her age to get on (minimum age is 18 and she's 17). And she stole my heart immediately--no, not in that way (shame on you), but I don't think I've ever developed a paternal concern for someone so quickly in my life. She has a gentle vivacity to her and an almost British sense of absurdity that lights up her entire face when she smiles. As you might imagine from a 17 year-old who treks in from out of town alone to meet a foreign stranger, she's mature beyond her years and is pretty much the only person here who I feel has really taken an interest in me as simply another human being rather than as some sort of pet or novelty item. (This isn't to say that other people have treated me only as a pet or novelty item, but I generally feel like I'm on display here--and when I travel generally--and it's a public me that people encounter and want to get to know rather than the "real" me: I too often feel I'm representing myself rather than being myself.) She's in her last year of school, and was admitted to the top school in Isfahan on the basis of her math skills, but she professes to hate math, and unlike most of her peers--and against the wishes of her parents--has no desire to go to university either. Her real ambition is to be a florist: she's most happy when she's tending to flowers and wants to make that her life. And, like every young, educated Iranian I've met, her other ambition is to get out of Iran. She has an uncle in Amsterdam who might be able to help her get there to train at a flower academy (as I learned in Ethiopia, the Netherlands are the global nerve centre of the cut flower trade), but she's a bit apprehensive about it because she doesn't know him very well and doesn't want to be so thoroughly dependent on a near-stranger in a foreign country.
So we spent our morning visiting the Masjed-e Sheikh Lotfollah and the Hasht Behesht Palace. The Masjed-e Sheikh Lotfollah is the other mosque in Nashq-e Jahan Square besides the massive Masjed-e Shah, which I visited the previous day. This one is much more modest in scale, but with a grace that compares favourably with the larger one. I complained in the previous blog entry about being overwhelmed by the treasures of Nashq-e Jahan Square, feeling inadequate to the task of taking them all in. I think at least a small part of that overwhelmed feeling was that I was too much in tourist mode, moving from one place to the next at too fast a pace. It's a further tribute to Gol Furush that her idea of a good time involved just sitting inside the Masjed-e Sheikh Lotfollah and chatting quietly for an hour as we slowly soaked it in. It's still simply too too much, but I felt over that hour that the overwhelmed feeling gave way to peace to some degree, and that that mosque disclosed some of its secrets to my more patient eye. It also helped that there genuinely was peace in the mosque: we were never alone, but there were never more than a half dozen other people in there with us. It's one of the things that's mind-blowing about being in Isfahan: if these buildings were in Paris or Rome they'd be packed to the gills (to the tops of the minarets?) and the sound pollution of clicking cameras and gee-whiz inanities would be such that it would be impossible to hear yourself think, let alone find the kind of peace that stills thought. But because I'm in Iran, I see only a handful of foreign tourists and have these magnificent treasures mostly to myself.
The next stop was the Hasht Behesht Palace, which is situated in the middle of a leafy park not far from Nashq-e Jahan Square, and gave me a strong feeling for how nice it must have been to be shah. The interior is fairly damaged, but it still gives the impression of gracious luxury.
For lunch, Gol Furush and I wandered down to the dry riverbed of the Zayandeh River--I've heard different reports, but it seems some combination of little precipitation and damming works has turned the major river that cuts through Isfahan into a beige smear of dust. Which is a pity on a number of levels, not least of which is that the river is straddled by a number of remarkable bridges, which now stand there like lost children, full of life but unsure what to do with themselves. Nevertheless, we trekked across the central bridge--Pol e Si-o-Seh (my Farsi is at least good enough that I can tell you that Si-o-Seh means "thirty-three," although I'm not sure why the bridge has this name)--which looks like a miniature Roman aqueduct, and met Gol Furush's English tutor for lunch. He lived in the US as a child and speaks the fluent-yet-fumbling English of someone with lots of exposure to the language but none recently. After lunch in an exquisite traditional restaurant (Isfahan seems to do these things well), he wanted to show me the apartment complex he used to manage (I'd said I wanted to see the Masjed-e Jameh, but sometimes the host takes strange prerogatives) where we happily ran into an old friend of his and spent an hour sitting in his very swank apartment drinking tea and appreciating his toy car collection.
By mid/late afternoon I was back at Mohsen's for the next leg of Iranian hospitality. As I mentioned in the previous blog entry, Mohsen is a computer and Photoshop nerd, and had invited round his guru from Isfahan University. Except in Iran, "invite round" means inviting round the entire extended family (something like ten adults and three young children), and half of them spend the night at your place before moving on. The party was in full swing when I arrived and soon moved out for an evening stroll through Nashq-e Jahan Square before settling in to dinner at Bon Appetit, which is a charmingly enthusiastic imitation of a semi-upscale burger-and-pizza chain in the American fashion (they even had Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons playing on a TV screen). The guru, let's call him Mohammed, is a really lovely man who matches Gol Furush in his capacity to make a genuine connection with me. He has a gentle manner and a generous smile, and is wonderfully attentive to others. To take just one example, back at Mohsen's later in the evening, he noticed that I was a bit out of place in the mostly Farsi chat and roped me and another guy into a round robin tournament of backgammon (which I lost resoundingly). It wasn't just that he found a way to engage me (his English isn't bad, but it's halting), but he did so in a way that made me a part of the party rather than singling me out for pitying attention. He also has a PhD in psychology and teaches both psychology and digital arts at the university. Right now he's struggling with a tempting offer from the university in Mashhad, which would be a good career move but would take him far from family and the places he loves. Familiar academic dilemmas even in Iran.
The next morning I finally managed to get out to the Masjed-e Jameh, which is Iran's largest mosque, and which predates the Safavid treasures of Nashq-e Jahan Square. The oldest bits of the mosque date back to the 11th century efforts of Seljuk Turks, but part of the interest of the place is that it had various phases of construction (and destruction) and so also features elements from the Mongol period of domination as well as the later Safavids. I went alone, and the experience of the Masjed-e Sheikh Lotfollah the previous day inclined me to take it more slowly. I eventually settled in the north iwan, surrounded by geometrical patterns and highly stylized calligraphic inscriptions, and sat there for a good long time looking out on to the courtyard and the soaring minarets of the south iwan. As I soaked it all in, I noticed one significant aspect of Islam's interdiction on depicting the human form, and its consequent emphasis on geometrical patterning and elaborate calligraphy. In a church, my visual experience is intense and focused, where I'm drawn to images of Christ and the saints and I see--and only see--the story I'm being presented with. In a mosque there's no guiding image to focus the gaze upon, and so the visual experience is more diffuse: my eyes wander up and down, back and forth, almost mesmerized, but never settling on a single point of artistic emphasis. And that visual experience is tremendously soothing, broadening my visual experience and making it holistic rather than focused. To borrow vocabulary from the Buddhist tradition, you might say it prompts greater mindfulness. I can see why Islam has a strong (albeit controversial) tradition of mysticism.
Hassan had wanted to take me up Soffeh Mountain, which stands a little outside Isfahan, but for various logistical reasons we didn't have time to make the hike to the top, but instead took in the view over Isfahan from the park near the base of the mountain with a couple of his cousins. I then had a couple hours to shower, shave, and unwind a little before heading out for the evening's festivities.
The last Tuesday night before No Ruz is Chahar Shanbe-soori, a big celebration to see out the old year and see in the new. The main feature of the festival involves jumping over a bonfire to bring in good luck for the coming year, an Iranian custom that pre-dates Islam and is mildly disapproved of by the state. And if the "when in Rome" principle applied to feeding wild hyenas in Ethiopia, it certainly applies to jumping over a bonfire in Iran. The various couchsurfers I've met in the last few days (minus Gol Furush, who isn't part of that scene) all congregated in a courtyard house on the outskirts of town. It felt like a weird combination of an illegal rave and a high school party where someone's illicitly raided the parents' liquor cabinet (don't worry, mom and dad, this wasn't something I did in high school). It's forbidden for men and women to congregate like this at all, let alone dance together and other such things. There was even a secret stash of alcohol. As Hassan explained to me earlier in the day, "in Iran, everything is forbidden, and we do everything." The dancing mostly involved Iranian pop, but with frequent interruptions of Gangnam Style. It was a jolly gathering of mostly young people, but also a number of older folk and even some children. It's strange to think that what feels like a fairly tame party can count as subversive in Iran, but I was given a sharp reminder of this when the party broke up abruptly around 11pm when word got out that the police were coming. There was a mad dash for cars and we all screeched out into the night.
One feature of the party that made it feel more high school than illegal rave was the way that so much of the humour among the guys involves twelve-year-old sex and homosexuality jokes. A consequence of being over-sexed and under-sex-educated, I suppose. But I imagine it's also a feature of living in a regime that treats you like unruly adolescents: you maintain the role into adulthood. I suppose there's also the fact that in an economy that offers unpromising prospects to its educated youth, there's an extended adolescence of depending on one's parents and not being sure what one's going to do with one's life. I have no idea what that's like.
A couple nights ago I remembered that the flip flops I was wearing, which I'd bought in Oxford a couple years ago, were billed as Israeli military issue (I was just interested in them being cheap and durable, and they've been both). Fortunately any evidence of their provenance has long since worn off.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteoh my god!! was that really about me?!! :O
ReplyDeleteI don't know what to say!!! you are a legend, David!!
I wish you all the best whever you are and wherever you go
arezoo ----<@