Descendants of Cyrus

by Thornton, Christopher;

  “I would like to live in America,” Parviz cut in. “How can I get a visa? We’ve heard that if you have a relative there it is much easier.”

  Or impossible, I wanted to add. For State Department interviewers of Iranian visa applicants, having relatives in the U.S. could translate to having accomplices willing to shelter relatives seeking to stay beyond the terms of their visa. Or it might not. It was all up to the whim of the interviewer.

  This got their attention; their eyes fixed on me.

  “Visa rules are being reviewed all the time and could change at any moment,” I said, feeling wretched for fanning a flame of hope that could so easily be blown out, and probably would be. It was always like this when listening to Iranians longing to go to the U.S., study in the U.S., work in the U.S., or—an unimaginable fantasy—spend the rest of their lives as naturalized, tried-and-true American citizens. Against all my better instincts, I wanted to restore at least a thread of hope that a life in the U.S. might be possible.

  “One of the best ways is to be accepted for graduate study at a top-notch university,” I told them, feeling a bit like an employment counselor or student advisor. “Or, if you have a solid background in an area where the U.S. needs more skilled workers, you could apply for a job and then for a work visa.”

  Again, I knew that these options were the longest of long shots, but this group was in dire need of empathy and support, no matter how fanciful. And it was easy to see why a group of overeducated, unemployed, politically and religiously incorrect, stymied young men would find their confidence deflated, their optimism withered. Part of the reason lay in the everyday reminders of past grandeur and the achievements of the generations that had preceded them.

  Earlier in the day Aydin and I had stopped at the Dome of Soltaniyeh, a massive block of stone topped with the third-largest dome in the world, after Istanbul’s Aya Sofya and the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence. Built at the beginning of the fourteenth century by Sultan Mohammad Khodabandeh, the building was meant to house the remains of the Shiite holy men Imam Ali and Imam Hossein, but that never came to pass, and so it was left to be the resting place of only Sultan Mohammad himself. The cavernous interior features blue tile mosaics and elaborate swirling stucco designs that cover the alcoves and ascend the pillars that support the massive dome, changing patterns as they rise into the distant gloom overhead. A stone spiral staircase leads to an external balcony that circles the building, and from there one can look out on the town of Soltaniyeh, once a Mongol capital, and the wide plain that surrounds it.

  Then there are the Shiite shrines and burial places of other luminaries in Iranian history. The architecture of the massive shrines, their towering arched portals decorated in brilliant blue tile work, would have impressed Cyrus himself. Within the burial chambers visitors pay their respects by touching the metal grillwork that surrounds the elevated bier that contains the remains, illuminated by a green glow, chosen to create an aura of saintliness. In Tabriz, the Persian poets have their own monument—call it a shrine—because poetry nearly exceeds the status of religion among Iranians, and many will claim that religion comes in a distant second. This is the Maqbarat-o-shoara, or the Mausoleum of Poets, where poets representing a thousand years of literary history are buried. In Qazvin the Peighambarieh Shrine is the burial place of four Jewish saints believed to have predicted the birth of Christ. Symbols of past Persian greatness were evident even in a regional city like Qazvin. In the middle of a leafy, manicured park stands the Chehal Sotoun, a handsome pavilion dating to the sixteenth-century Safavid period, when Qazvin was the capital of the empire before Shah Abbas moved it to Esfahan. Locals refer to it as Emarate Kolah Faranagi, or “European Hat Mansion,” because that is what it resembles—a European visitor wearing a broad-brimmed hat. Today the pavilion doubles as a calligraphy museum that contains one of the most select collections in Iran. It displays the many styles in which the art is practiced—Nastaliq, Shekasteh-Nastaliq, Sols, and Naskh. Across brilliantly painted sheets of paper, lines of verse are not written but drawn in dashes and curls that flow and bend and swirl. Qazvin has been a center of calligraphy production for centuries, and many of its past masters—Abdorrashid Deilami, Goharshad Khatun, Mir Sadreddin, and Abdolmajid Taleqani—were born and learned their craft in the city, where it is still taught.

  A few days later, Aydin and I stopped at Takht-e Soleyman, or the Throne of Solomon, now the remains of a Zoroastrian temple complex and sixth-century Sassanid-era fortress well off the beaten track west of Zanjan. To get to it, we drove for more than an hour along a two-lane road through a rugged, arid mountain landscape that rivaled western Colorado in barren austerity and the eerie sense of loneliness that only desert mountain landscapes can evoke. The takht, or throne, sits in the middle of a high plain, and on that late December day a cold breeze was blowing from the north. Despite the bright sunlight, wisps of snow lingered in the shadows of the ruined walls.

  Takht-e Soleyman began as a Zoroastrian fire temple during the fifth century, dedicated to Anahita, the goddess of water. It achieved greater importance when the Adur Wishnasp, one of the three Great Holy Fires, was moved to the temple during the third-century Sassanid dynasty. Zoroastrianism was then the state religion of the empire. Zoroastrian kings had to pay homage to the Adur Wishnasp before they could assume the throne. Historians speculate that the site was chosen because of the deep spring-fed lake that lies at the center of the complex and stands out like a smooth, liquid crystal on the windswept plain. Sassanid rulers later turned the site into a fortress, constructing formidable stone walls around the perimeter to protect it from invaders, but they were unable to stop Byzantine armies from nearly destroying it in 627.

  After wandering around the stumps of the crumbling walls and columns, Aydin and I drove a short two miles to Zendan-e Soleyman, the top of a dormant volcanic crater where legends claim King Solomon kept monsters prisoner. Among Zoroastrians of the time, the Zendan-e Soleyman outranked Takht-e Soleyman in spiritual significance, and it stayed that way until the Adur Wishnasp was moved to the latter site, turning Zendan-e Soleyman into an also-ran.

  After a scramble to the top of the crater we looked over the rim into an enormous, yawning cavern. Aydin told me that in more modern times prisoners were executed by being hurled into the abyss. In the distance we could still see Takht-e Soleyman very clearly, now even more pronounced on the bright winter day, spread out on the tableland beneath the sharp mountain backdrop. It was a setting, with all its austere beauty, scripted for an ancient religious site.

  Surrounded by such cultural riches, with more to be found throughout Iran, it is no wonder that this stagnant generation would feel smitten, impotent, insignificant. It is also no wonder that America would emerge as the answer to all their ills. One could even say that if America didn’t exist, young Iranians would have to create it.

  “It’s become a craze, almost an obsession, to dream of a new life in America,” my guide Aydin told me, but almost disparagingly, suggesting that he recognized the facileness of the fantasy, or that he was not as impressed with America as the rest of his generation. Aydin was hard to read. At times he seemed to defend the status quo in Iran, or at least dismiss the most scathing voices. But he would also nod in agreement, however reluctantly, when I told him of the criticisms I had heard. “Students don’t even think of applying to universities in Europe, Canada, or Australia, even if their chances of getting in are much better. They just want to get to America. It’s America, America, America. Nothing else will do.”

  I was a little surprised by Aydin’s cynicism, because he himself was an example of career stagnation. He had graduated from elite Tehran University with a master’s degree in mechanical engineering but opted to lead foreigners around Iran because the pay was much better and job opportunities in his chosen path were extremely limited.

  “I worked in Tehran for a while but the city was expensive and the salary I was getting wasn’t high enough,” he tol
d me. “I had pretty good English ability and liked to travel, so I started to ask myself, ‘What else can I do?’”

  Aydin moved back to his parents’ house in Tabriz, obtained a tourist guide’s license, and began offering his services to the travel agents and tour companies authorized to handle Western visitors.

  I asked him what it took to be assigned to Western tourists. Was it English ability? No, enough tour guides had that, though they might spend most of their time guiding groups of South Koreans or Russians. One of Aydin’s colleagues was learning Chinese. The key factor, he said, was not to care about politics. I guessed that the qualification for tour guides was not to appear to care about politics, or at least to discuss it. This was not hard to understand, for politics was a constant theme when meeting young Iranians, and considerable political discussion took place at the late-night Zanjan café. The other popular topic among Iranian youth was religion, or the rejection of it.

  “No one here believes in God,” Javad boldly stated, followed by a quick translation for the rest of the group. Affirmative nods followed. “No one goes to the mosque. There’s nothing for us to do, so we come here to watch football, or we go to Hadi’s.”

  Who was Hadi? At that moment, on cue, Hadi entered, a wiry man with short-cropped black hair and a neatly trimmed black beard. Hadi was the owner of the café, and like many café owners, he had had numerous run-ins with the authorities. They had tried to close him down several times, and, as usual in such cases, the inspectors were more interested in stacking up bribes than enforcing the laws of the Islamic regime. That he ran a Western-style café that seemingly promoted Western-style debauchery—women were invited—placed him under suspicion. To please the authorities, he posted a list of house rules on the walls that accorded with strict Islamic values: no smoking was allowed, women could not congregate with men, no one under fifteen years of age could be admitted, no politics could be discussed, and so on. But enforcement was discretionary to nonexistent. Cigarette smoke floated in the air, and loaded ashtrays needed emptying, men and women gathered together freely, and for the last hour we had been talking about nothing but politics.

  Then there was the matter of the pillows. The covers of the small backrest pillows that lined the sofa along the wall were printed with archival front pages of newspapers from the English-speaking world—the New York Times, Washington Post, London’s Guardian. For the authorities, that was too much. Hadi was threatened with closure. What could he do?

  Problems with the authorities usually have only one solution. “I went to the police station and paid them,” Hadi explained. They never came back. The pillow covers remained.

  When Parviz, Javad, and Hamid weren’t watching football on the biggest of the wall-mounted TV screens, they were sometimes at Hadi’s house, drinking his homemade wine.

  “There’s no way to have fun in Iran,” Javad continued, “not for young people. We say it’s illegal to laugh in Iran.”

  In conversations with Iranians, subtext is far more important than anything that is stated openly, and often what is not said is more important than what is. The silence after the mention of the wine meant that no offer to sample some of Hadi’s personal vintage was forthcoming. As someone who had already fallen under the eyes of the authorities, he could take no risks, but he still wanted to play the gracious host in other ways. He asked where I was going after the café closed. Back to my hotel, I told him. Did I need a ride? I thanked him for the offer but assured him that my hotel was only a five-minute walk away. He still offered to drive me. I assured him that I wasn’t trying to refuse his offer, but my hotel was, I assured him again, just five minutes away. I convinced him, and he was finally satisfied enough to let me strut the five minutes on my own. After he left, the young men returned to the TV set to catch the last minutes of Real Madrid action. I asked Javad for my bill.

  “Oh, no—Hadi said you are our guest tonight,” he replied, and he gave me a bag of peanuts in case I was hankering for a midnight snack.

  Rural hamlets are sprinkled throughout the Iran countryside, and a few days later Aydin and I visited another, the village of Kandovan, about an hour along another twisting two-lane road that slowly rises up another mountain valley in the middle of the Sahand Protected Area. On both sides of the road the view is broad and sweeping both to the east and west, and the valley opens its arms to an arc of sky stretching overhead.

  Kandovan is built vertically, on a steep hillside that ascends the southern side of the valley. But Kandovan’s history, shaped by ever-changing geology, sets it apart from most of rural Iran. The landscape that now contains the village was formed approximately eleven thousand years ago, when the now dormant volcano Mount Sahand erupted, spewing lava and ash that over time hardened into volcanic rock. Water erosion did the rest—shaping the rock into cave-like formations that make the entire face of the mountain resemble an insect colony, or a collection of beehives. The rock was ideal for cave dwelling, shielding the interior from outside heat in summer and bitter cold in winter. The result was the energy-efficient houses the cave dwellers of Kandovan carved out of the hardened molten lava.

  We parked at the edge of town and walked along the cobbled main street into the center, a crossroads where a turn to the right led to a bridge that crossed the stream that cut through the town and valley, and to the left to a lane that climbed into the village. It was the middle of winter but also Friday, the end of the Iranian weekend. Lingering day-trippers were wandering the streets and popping into the gift shops, open to catch whatever off-season rials might pass their way. The streets ascended the mountainside, ending where the balconies of the highest houses offered views of the mountain face on the other side of the valley.

  Most of the residents of Kandovan are owners of seasonal gift shops and eateries, which open for business at the beginning of spring and close up at the end of summer, or when autumn crowds dwindle to a trickle, the fate of off-the-beaten-path, picturesque villages around the world that extend their life span by serving as rural getaways for city dwellers. But Kandovan has some year-round mainstays—the farmers and goatherds who market their wool products and locally made honey and handicrafts and cobble together the rest of their livelihoods by running a gift shop or homestay, a bed for the night for budget-conscious travelers. They have made the caves their homes, fitting them out with windows and balconies and exterior staircases to climb to their many levels—rock penthouses rebranded as ecofriendly lodgings for the back-to-nature tourist market.

  Though eco-consciousness may be a prime motivation for lifestyle habits today, cave life in Kandovan was initially driven by the most basic need—survival. Most historians believe that it was the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century that drove the people of the Kandovan region into the lava-formed caves. About ten minutes before we reached the town, Aydin and I pulled to the side of the road to take a look at a cluster of burrows dug into the slowly sloping hillside. Archaeological evidence dates these to the thirteenth century. Word of Mongol savagery and its take-no-prisoners approach to conquest had reached this part of Iran, and the inhabitants soon saw that a life below ground was at least marginally safer than above it. The caves were dug, and their residents emerged during the day to tend to their fields and herds, and then hunkered in their subterranean hovels to avoid certain slaughter at night.

  With the afternoon light fading and the temperature dropping, Aydin dropped me at the Laleh Kandovan International Hotel, where the rooms are caves cut into the rock hillside. He headed back to Tabriz to spend the night in the comfort of his own bed; I was left to spend the night as a cave dweller—twenty-first-century style. My room was outfitted in what could only be described as rural chic—hand-woven carpets on the stone floor and a matching hand-woven cover on the bed, track lighting in the stone ceiling, a flat-screen TV mounted on a stone countertop, and a working Jacuzzi in the bathroom, also hollowed out of rock.

  All of this would have been utterly absurd had it not been so tasteful
ly designed. What could have been a Flintstones theme park buried in the wilds of Iran was instead a subdued preserve of rural traditional life. The small terrace outside my door overlooked the valley, which was, after dark, not garishly lit, but swallowed in darkness. Only the dim lights outside the other rooms and the lights that lit the wooden walkways up and down the stone staircases shone in the winter night. The hotel restaurant was also dug into the rock, and that was where I had my dinner—gormeh sabzi, an herb-based stew loaded with lamb and vegetables and accompanied, as almost all Iranian dishes are, by a mountain of rice.

  After dinner I took a stroll through the village, which was dark and quiet now that the day-trippers had left. Faint overhead lights illuminated the twisting lanes that wound up the side of the mountain, and fainter lights inside the rock-hewn houses showed that Kandovan was more than just a tourist showpiece that emptied with the departure of the last visitor, like a traveling circus folding its tents after its last performance. The few sounds that stirred the night—the barking of a dog, the babbling of the stream tumbling over the rocks as it passed under the wooden bridge—tugged at the silence for brief moments, but, when they receded, a hollowed quiet like that which can only be heard on a dark night deep in a mountain valley returned.

  I was heading back to the hotel along the deserted main road when a near full moon rose above the ridgeline on the western side of the valley. Soon the cool light spread over the mountainside, drawing out the brightness in the wispy remnants of the snowfields near the crest of the ridge and throwing the barren trees into dark silhouette. Now I could imagine what it would have been like to have been hunkered in one of those cave homes of Kandovan back in the thirteenth century, waiting for a horde of Mongol tribesman to attack, looking for the glow of a light that could spell annihilation.