Sharing Shiraz

In an earlier post, I noted that Esfahan is known as "half the world." It seems the other half descends on Shiraz for the No Ruz holiday. This is the time that Iranians all go on holiday and Shiraz and Esfahan are the two top destinations of choice (one reason I dashed down to Esfahan as soon as I arrived in Iran, in order to beat the No Ruz rush). It would have been difficult to avoid both Shiraz and Esfahan for the whole of No Ruz, so I bit the bullet and spent the tail end of the holiday here.

Shiraz and Shirazis have the reputation in Iran that Italy and Italians have in Europe: a beautiful, cultured place with a laid-back lifestyle and a population with a deep love for the finer things in life (and so I thank my lucky stars I live with two Italians in Oxford). I'll confess I didn't develop a deep love of Shiraz during my time here, but see the previous paragraph: half the people in the city weren't Shirazis, and every noteworthy site was sardine-packed with Iranian tourists. Still, I can see why the place has its appeal: it's greener than most Iranian cities, and notable for its gardens. The Persian garden has such a distinguished tradition that thirteen of them--including the Bagh-e Eram in Shiraz--are jointly designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, although, to be honest, I think the rest of the world has caught up: the Bagh-e Eram was indeed lovely, but besides its distinguished history, I wouldn't necessarily rank it above the VanDusen Gardens in Vancouver (although not necessarily below either).

I decided I'd done enough couchsurfing for one trip and stayed in a really lovely boutique hotel in the old part of Shiraz, but still met up with a few people through couchsurfing: before realizing I needed a bed of my own, I'd sent out an open request on couchsurfing and was invited to meet more people than I had time for. My first was also my favourite. We'll call him Alireza (judging from the calls of impatient mothers, half the boys in Iran are called Alireza; the other half are called Mohsen). He's an artist and also teaches art and art history at the university in Shiraz. He designs jewellery and also does various kinds of painting, sculpture, and mixed media work. And I was genuinely impressed (as opposed to just politely curious) when I visited his studio. The most exciting project, to my mind, is one that's still in progress and I'm sworn to secrecy. But I also bought a couple pairs of earrings (Simona, I don't know if you're reading this, but consider your request for Iranian earrings met) which he sculpts out of brass and shapes to form calligraphic words from Iranian poems.

Homosexuality is so illegal in Iran that it's punishable by death. I wouldn't want to invite anyone to incriminate himself, besides which cultural differences can make the gaydar a little wonky, but by any normal standard--from the effeminate gait to the flamboyant dress sense--Alireza is as gay as No Ruz. This is just one way in which he differs from most other people I've met in Iran. He's also the only Iranian I've conversed with about Kafka and Chekhov, Manet and Foucault. He also has a puckish wit, and is generally fabulous. But I'll talk more about him in a bit. I'll try to remain chronological here.

My first full day in Shiraz (I first met Alireza the evening after I'd arrived on the night bus from Ahvaz) I met up with another couchsurfer, who we'll call Danial. He'd offered to put me up and I'm glad I was feeling couch-weary enough that I opted for the hotel instead. I spent a good deal of my day with him trying to figure out why he irritated me so much. He was friendly and well-mannered enough, and granted he wasn't the most interesting human being in the world and there was a bit of a language barrier, but I found myself unreasonably annoyed with him. The biggest fault was that he kept touching me. Again, nothing creepy or aggressive, but it was maybe precisely the vagueness of it that annoyed me. It was as if he couldn't talk to me without gently brushing his hand against my arm in a way that almost made me wish he'd just get a firmer grip on me. Iranians in general have a closer conception of personal space (at least the men--in general it's not okay to even touch women here) but Danial was the first person to whom I felt compelled to explain--twice--as politely as I could the cultural differences about personal space in our respective countries. And not even because he was necessarily more invasive of that personal space, but because there was something mysteriously irritating about the way he did it. He also had this weird vacant stare. It was as if he was possessed by an absent-minded alien.

And all of this is very nasty of me because, like I said, he didn't actually do anything wrong, and indeed worked very hard to show me a good time. We spent the morning seeing a couple of the major sights in Shiraz, most notably the Karim Khan Citadel, an imposing fortress that stands smack in the middle of Shiraz. Despite being an ancient and important city in Iran's history, Shiraz was only briefly the capital, during the short-lived 18th century Zand dynasty, and its founder Karim Khan did a lot to build or rebuild bits of the city.

But luck struck around midday when a friend of Danial's called to ask him if he wanted to go to Pasargadae, the ancient capital of Cyrus II, and a two-hour drive out of Shiraz. I was planning to see it on a full-day tour that included Persepolis, but this offer saved me both time and money, and had the added karmic benefit that, as the day wore on, Danial became less irritating to me. It probably helped that he had two friends with him, so that I wasn't the focal point of his fuzzy attention.

Western history and historiography begins with Herodotus' Histories, which deal with the rise to dominance of the Persian Empire, and the Persians' wars with the Greeks. And between Pasargadae and later Persepolis, I've seen the heart of the largest empire the world had known at that time. The Achaemenid Dynasty rose from a local power to a global empire with the conquests of Cyrus in the middle of the sixth century BC. His great successor, Darius, moved the capital to Persepolis, and what with the plunders of Alexander the Great, there isn't a whole lot left of Pasargadae, but the austerity of the place is moving in itself. It's set in the middle of a broad wind-swept plain, and the lack of other large buildings adds to the feeling of desolation around Cyrus's imposing tomb. It was still No Ruz when I visited, so the hordes of tourists diminished the feeling of desolation somewhat, but the plain is vast enough that I could still feel the loneliness of the dead king.

The following day (we're at Monday now) was fairly low-key but involved visits to two major shrines. In the morning I dropped by the Aramgah-e Shah-e Cheragh, which houses the mausoleum of Sayyed Mir Ahmad, one of the brothers of Imam Reza (the 8th imam of Shi'a Islam, and the only one buried in Iran), who was killed here in 835 AD. The history of Shi'a Islam is marked by martyrdom: its founders and leaders rejected the compromises with politics and power made by the Sunni caliphs, and the caliphs tended to respond by bringing the heavy hands of politics and power down on the Shi'a founders and leaders. Despite the obsession with martyrdom in Shi'a Islam, it's worth noting that, with the glaring exception of Hezbollah's 1983 attack on the US Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, almost all suicide attacks by Islamist terrorists have been carried out by Sunni Muslims, and not Shi'ites. But that said, martyrdom is a big deal in Shi'a Islam, as it the perpetual sense of victimhood. A deep strain of grief and aggrievedness runs through Shi'a Islam, and they continue to wait for the return of the 12th Imam who will restore a long-lost justice to the world.

All by way of introduction to my first visit to a Shi'a shrine. The Shah-e Cheragh is massive, with a huge open courtyard lined with fountains and trees and covered in carpets where the faithful can relax in the shade. (One of the things I've noticed about Muslims is that they seem to be far more relaxed about their places of worship. Mosques are richly carpeted but there are no chairs or pews, so people tend to sit or kneel on the ground. And while people obviously do a lot of praying in mosques, mosques seem also to double as community gathering places--far more than churches do--so that it's perfectly normal for a group of men (probably true of the women as well, but they're normally on the far side of a curtain from me) just to lounge about on the floor and gossip while others pray around them.) While the courtyard and domes were tiled with the characteristic blue-and-turquoise that make Iranian mosques so easy on the eyes (it only occurred to me here that our word "turquoise" is derived from "Turkey," a point which the Iranians resent, since Iran is a more important source of turquoise than Turkey), the present mausoleum was built during the 19th century Qajar dynasty, when people had an unfortunate obsession with mirrors and glitter. Walking into the shrine was like opening a door into a massive disco ball, and the Qajar era was in general about on an aesthetic plane with the disco era.

In the middle of the mausoleum sits the tomb itself, behind a cage and under green light, and the faithful crowd around to touch it, press their heads against it, pray against it, take photos of themselves and their children in front of it. Unfortunately, their reverence for Sayyad Mir Ahmad doesn't extend to reverence for their fellow human beings, and I often felt like an inconvenient pylon that had to be casually thrust aside so that others could get to where they were going quicker. But despite the frantic busyness of the place, there was a sense of deep reverence. While there was pushing and shoving and clicking cameras five metres from the tomb, at the tomb itself people seemed to connect with something that will have to remain mostly a mystery to secular souls like myself. And the grief at Sayyad Mir Ahmad's martyrdom was also apparent. In particular, I saw a woman sobbing loudly outside the mausoleum.

Perhaps even more sacred to Iranians, I visited the tomb of Hafez in the afternoon. Hafez, who lived in the 14th century, is generally regarded as the greatest of Iranian poets, and has a place in Iranian literature something akin to Shakespeare's in English. There's an Iranian saying that every house must have a Qur'an and a copy of Hafez's poetry, and in many Iranian homes I think the order of priority is the reverse of what I listed here. I've been trying to read some of Hafez in translation, with limited success. It seems pretty, and there's lots of nice stuff involving nightingales and roses and wine and the love of life and the sorrow of death, but I don't think he translates well. My friend Eddie told me a nice line, which I think comes from a Chinese monk struggling with translations of the Buddhist suttas: reading literature in translation is like swallowing the rice another man has chewed for you. I think there's a lot of variation in who translates well. I've been charmed and astonished by some of the translations of Rumi in the same collection, although Rumi has the further advantage of having come into vogue more recently in the West, which makes the translations more recent and more accessible. The Hafez translations are as much as two hundred years old and there's a little too much thou-ing and loveth-ing. But thinking of Hafez's nightingales, it occurred to me that I'd probably have a similarly hard time reading Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" in translation: I'd see that there were some nice thoughts in there, but that poem only sings because of the way its very precise word choices fit into its very subtle meter, and I don't think you can translate that. By contrast, I imagine I could get most of the power of Shelley's "Ozymandias" in a translation.

So anyway, Hafez's tomb is set in a graceful garden befitting of the man. Again, No Ruz made it a bit of a madhouse, but that was part of the interest, in a way. Like the Shah-e Cheragh, I saw people crowding around Hafez's tomb so that they could lay a hand on it, and I even saw a man sitting by the tomb and weeping openly. It made me wish I had better translations, or better Farsi.

I'd agreed to meet a third couchsurfer at the shrine of Hafez, call her Negar. She'd written to say she couldn't host me but was keen to meet and talk with a real philosopher. She was generally nervous and embarrassed, but despite her limited English seemed keen to get right into philosophy. She'd heard that some people wanted to argue that God didn't exist: what made them think that? Okay, starting with the light questions, then. So I ran through a bit of Dawkins and a bit of Hume, suggesting that the Argument from Evil struck me as a lot more compelling than the New Atheism. But how can people go on living if they don't believe in God, she asked. I tried out a bit of Camus on that one, with his line about how there's only one genuine philosophical problem and that is suicide. Because, she said, if she didn't believe in God, she thought she'd want to kill herself. Nervous laughter. Actually, she had tried to kill herself ten years ago, with pills, but it didn't work. Nervous laughter. In an instant, my philosophical training got replaced by my Toronto Distress Centre training and Dawkins and Hume got replaced by Eckhart Tolle and the Buddha (who remained nameless for fear of turning someone off by preaching an alien religion). By the end of the conversation I felt I'd given her a few things to think about, but I also came away thinking that my philosophical training really doesn't prepare me for the sorts of questions that most ordinary people think of as most philosophically pressing.

And yesterday (Tuesday) was Sizdah Be Dar, which marks the end of the No Ruz holiday. The tradition is for everyone to get out of town and into nature (did I mention already how much I love the No Ruz traditions?), and I managed to secure an invitation to join Alireza and a couple of his friends on a jaunt out of town to the area around Firuz Abad, notable for some Sassanid ruins. Because the rest of Shiraz had the same get-out-of-town plans as us, Alireza insisted (probably rightly) that we needed a very early start, so at 5:30am, I was picked up in a creaky old car that was held together by chewing gum and a prayer. (As it happened, we nearly didn't make it back into town. Toward the end of the day, we had problems with the fan belt (identifying the part of the car that had a problem is the extent of my knowledge of auto mechanics), but Iranian kindness to strangers doesn't just extend to foreigners. Within a couple minutes, two separate vehicles had pulled over to the side of the road and a couple Samaritans were busily on their backs fiddling around underneath the car and grubbying their hands tinkering under the hood.)

The day trip took in a couple Sassanid monuments, the most impressive being Ardashir's Palace, an 1800-year-old castle that reminded me of nothing quite so much as the ruined castles I used to run around in England and Wales, albeit with more arches and fewer spiral staircases. But my eight-year-old self took great pleasure running about this citadel of one of Rome's great foes. The Sassanids were early innovators in dome architecture, and indeed, the domes of mosques owe a great deal to Sassanid influence. Unfortunately, the invading Arabs of the 7th century were also dead set on eradicating all pre-Islamic seats of power and religion, so that the ruin of Ardashir's Palace is about the only half-decent instance of Sassanid architecture left.

But sightseeing was only a small part of Sizdah Be Dar. The main event was the picnic and barbeque. Being a vegetarian limits the pleasures of a barbeque somewhat, but Alireza was very accommodating in making sure there was enough of the right food for me and including me in the fun. We found a patch of dirt a bit off the road (Iranians seem to love roadside picnics, and you even see people rolling out picnic blankets on the green median on dual carriageways), rolled out the picnic blankets, started a fire (here I was a bit more helpful: judging from his firemaking skills, Alireza didn't grow up in the Pacific Northwest), heaped some coals over it, and soon bits of marinated chicken were sizzling away on skewers. And after eating our fill, we all lay back on our picnic blankets and napped in the shade. If that's not the way to see out a two-week holiday, I don't know what is.

It was also a very jolly gathering, and even though Alireza was the only one of the three with any English, the other two were also keen to include me and were hugely encouraging of any limited Farsi I could contribute to the proceedings. Iranians have a lot of jokes about people from different regions, each with its own stereotypes, but no one comes in for more good-natured ribbing than the Qazvinis, who--so the stereotype goes--are all gay. Lots of oh-so-funny jokes about how it's unsafe to bend over to pick up something you drop on the sidewalk in Qazvin. But it was particularly weird hearing the same Qazvin jokes I've heard all over Iran from a bunch of guys at least two of whom were rather flamboyant cheerleaders for Team Qazvin.

And today was Persepolis. Given the tourist hordes everywhere in Shiraz, I thought it would be wise to hold off seeing Iran's premier tourist attraction until after the holiday was over. Persepolis was the capital of Darius the Great, probably the greatest of Persia's emperors, although most famous in the West for losing to a plucky Greek force at Marathon, thereby ending Persia's bid for dominance over the Greeks. But judging from the bas reliefs at Persepolis, the Greeks were pretty much the only people in the ancient world not paying tribute to Darius and his descendants. One of the most famous monuments in Persepolis is the Apadana Staircase, which represents in bas relief delegations from 23 different nations coming to pay tribute to the Persian emperor, from places as far-flung as Ethiopia (and to think, last year I was in Aksum, the capital from which those ambassadors likely departed!).

To be honest, the sculptures in Persepolis aren't as impressive as the Parthenon Marbles: the figures in these friezes are stiff compared to the flowing vitality of Greek sculpture. But the sheer size of Persepolis is breathtaking. Even in its ruined state (compliments of Alexander the Great) you get a sense of a gargantuan palace complex that was designed--and very successfully so--to awe all visitors with the impression that they had reached the heart of the greatest empire on Earth.

The visit to Persepolis was complemented by a brief visit to nearby Naqsh-e Rostam, where four Persian emperors, including Darius, are buried. Their mausolea are halfway up a cliff, and it's still a mystery to me how the coffins were carried up there and then sealed behind stone slabs (later busted up and pillaged by Alexander, bane to Persia), and my not-worth-the-money guide had no real clue either. (I wish guides could admit when they don't know the answer to something rather than throw a lot of unhelpful bullshit my way). But halfway up that cliff, with columns and friezes to announce the grandeur of the kings that are buried there, you really do get a powerful sense of desolation and the deaths of kings.

And finally we reach the present. This afternoon was fairly low-key, although it included a late afternoon visit to the exquisite Nasir-al-Molk mosque, made all the more exquisite by the fact that the No Ruz hordes have now moved on, and I had it mostly to myself in the gentle light of the late afternoon.

Wandering home reminded me how much I like street life in Iranian cities. As the evening sets in, lights come on in all the little streetside shops where they sell clothes and sweets and household wares and various other things. And as the heat of the day subsides, Iranians flock into the street in good spirits, wandering up and down, either to go shopping (I get the impression that Iran is a nation of shopaholics) or simply to be in the presence of others.

And tomorrow I hope I'll be on a bus to Kerman. It seems the headaches of No Ruz travel aren't entirely over. Because the weekend in Iran (don't quote me on this, but I think this is true of all Muslim countries) falls on a Thursday and Friday, a lot of Iranians have extended their time off work/school until after the weekend, so the next few days are still busy ones for travel. I was told a couple days ago that all the buses to Kerman are booked for a week but that it's often possible to get a spare seat if I just show up on the day. Here's hoping. So far my luck in Iran has been phenomenal, although I suppose that also means it would only be fair if it failed this time.

One of the features of travelling in places like Ethiopia and Iran is that I meet travellers far more hardcore than myself. At the Chahar Shanbe-soori party in Esfahan I met four Poles who were hitchhiking from Poland to Singapore, determined on principle not to pay for either travel or accommodation just to prove how far one could get on the kindness of strangers. But sharing my dormitory in Shiraz I met a Taiwanese guy who's now two-and-a-half years into a cycling trip. He started in Alaska and cycled down to Argentina, then flew to Spain and cycled up to Norway, flew to Cape Town and then cycled up through most of Africa and is now on his way home and hoping to reach Taiwan by the end of the year. I imagine returning to ordinary life will involve an incredibly difficult adjustment period for him.