I wanted to accept Alireza’s invitation, but my senses weren’t drowned in enough cognac to not realize it was impossible. “No one bothers us . . . everything in this country is all about relationships,” he had said, which was true—for Iranians who know the right people. But the prospect of being nabbed drinking illegally made wine in an Iranian home by a rogue police officer who didn’t put much stock in personal relationships wasn’t something I wanted to chance, not as a foreign visitor, and an American to boot. So I politely declined Alireza’s offer, taking a rain check till the day when alcohol could be drunk freely throughout Iran—whenever that may come.
It was time to go. Hossein was about to turn out the lights. I didn’t have to call for a taxi because Alireza had his car out front and insisted on giving me a ride to my hotel, also tucked away in the Ramsar hills. The rain was still coming down as he steered his white Peugeot up the zigzagging streets to the driveway of the hotel. We pulled up to the door, and he seemed reluctant to shut off the engine, or drive away. He took a business card out of his wallet and scribbled his mobile number on the back.
“Now you have another friend in Iran,” he said as we bid our farewells.
The next morning I expected to wake up with a head the size of a kettledrum, but the crystal-clear homemade hooch had passed through without leaving a footprint. The rain had passed, and occasional shafts of sunlight were breaking through the cloud cover. Conditions were ripe for a climb to the ruins of a thirteenth-century fort set high atop a promontory overlooking the city.
After breakfast, Aydin and I hopped in the Saipa, headed south, and then angled through a neighborhood of one-story houses to the beginning of a trail that led up to the fort. The steep rock trail was slick with cold morning dew that also reflected the sunlight as it danced off the dripping leaves. In fifteen minutes we had reached the base of the walls of the fort. From the ruins of the ramparts it was easy to see why Alireza would choose Ramsar as his home-away-from-home, or home-back-home, depending, of course, on whether he felt he had a home anywhere at all. Ramsar was Southern California reimagined on the shores of the Caspian. The city, with its apron of white stucco houses topped with red-tiled roofs, spread out along the silvery blue coastline. Along the seafront boulevard palm trees gently nodded in the morning breeze.
“I’m Iranian and I love Iran, but I could not live here,” I recall Alireza saying. “It’s ‘the system,’” he added, using the catchall term for the Islamic government and its suffocating laws, but for Alireza it also meant a backward mindset that represented all that ailed Iran. “It doesn’t encourage growth, the growth of the individual. Every time I come back I know that I can only stay for a few months. After that I feel that I have to leave. I feel like my life is standing still.”
Alireza’s life could almost be summed up by the tired phrase, “You can’t go home again,” but he had proven it wrong. He could go home again—as long as “home” was defined as a little fortress of his own, deep up in the Ramsar hills to keep the realities of present-day Iran at a distance.
After the trek up to the fort, Aydin and I drove to Ramsar Palace, the prime reason for Ramsar’s inclusion on the tourist trail. The palace was built in 1937 by Reza Shah Pahlavi to serve as a summer getaway whenever he wanted to escape the congestion of Tehran. The relatively small building, with its white marble façade, almost swallowed up by an extensive, manicured garden, reminded me of the kind of bungalow Russia’s Catherine the Great would have given to one of her many lovers once she was ready to toss him aside. The summer residences of the Russian nobility scattered around St. Petersburg tried to mimic the grand opulence of the French royalty, but Ramsar is a slightly different case.
To call Ramsar a palace is something of a misnomer, for the chunky, compact house lacks the sprawling layout, glitter, and grandeur of Versailles or Peterhof. Ramsar could be better seen as representing the period from the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, when significant European influence, from France in particular, spread eastward. The palace could also be seen as symbolizing the bifurcation of the Iranian identity—devotedly and defiantly Persian but also reaching to embrace Western ways.
Today, Ramsar Palace also stands for something else, which ties it, ironically, to the Islamic regime—the alienation of rulers from the Iranian people. The majority of Iranians are nowhere near as consumed by religion and Islamic principles as the ruling mullahs would like them to be and believe they should be. Likewise, during the reign of the Pahlavis a wide swath of Iranian society was not as enamored of Western ways as the secular ruling class wanted them to be and believed they should be. Many will claim that this disconnect, as much as his megalomania and repressive policies, led to the downfall of Mohammad Reza.
“The shah did do a lot to modernize Iran,” one friend, born just before the Islamic Revolution, told me, “but he moved too fast for some of the people. The more liberal elements were opposed to his authoritarianism, but the conservatives and many people in the countryside saw him as betraying Persian values.”
Today it may be rimmed with seasonal homes owned by the urban, monied class in Tehran and the rest of northern Iran, but the Caspian shore was slow to develop. The western slopes of the Alborz Mountains shielded it from settlers moving north from central Iran, for centuries an intimidating Russian Empire glowered to the north, and to the east lay the open sea. The Caspian shore remained a backwater. Yet it became the source for one of Iran’s most well-known exports—caviar, khaviyar in Persian—specifically beluga caviar, the “Iranian diamond,” so named because of its high quality. Beluga sturgeon, the fish that produce the tiny dark eggs, have been known to live up to one hundred years.
Oddly, caviar has never played a significant role in Persian cuisine. Iranians don’t “do caviar.” Most of the caviar for consumption is found in five-star hotels for foreign visitors, in other words, business travelers and tourists seeking a taste of Iran that in everyday terms is not very Iranian. The majority of the tiny black fish eggs, tightly packed in small, round tin containers, are exported to distant parts of the world and identified, for marketing purposes, as “Iranian caviar.” What these glossy ads do not say is that overfishing of the Caspian, combined with increasing pollution and economic sanctions, has meant that Iran’s caviar industry has been hit hard, reducing it to a fraction of its former size.
The port of Bandar-e Anzali, near Rasht, is another fading star. At the beginning of the last century, the city thrived off trade with imperial Russia, but the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 slammed the door. After seventy years of hibernation, trade with Russia picked up again following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but once again it dwindled when economic sanctions hampered all economic activity with Iran. Nevertheless, the one-hundred-year-old “Russia connection” managed to leave a mark on Iranian politics through the export of communism and socialist thought, which would take shape as the Persian Communist Party and become an influential force in Iranian politics up to the reign of Shah Reza Mohammad Pahlavi. The shah’s fierce anticommunist stance earned him American backing until his Western leanings were cast into doubt, a key factor that cost him Western support during the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Before plunging into more questions of politics, Aydin and I decided to seek the peace of the countryside. We drove about twenty miles outside the city to the Gilan Rural Heritage Museum, where cottages and farmhouses and fishmongers’ hovels, and even a rural mosque, had been uprooted from their foundations and reconstructed in a sylvan preserve that was part living history, part woodland retreat.
For a couple of hours, as dusk fell, Aydin and I wandered the paths that weaved through the forest, stopping at building after wood-framed building to get a glimpse into nineteenth-century Persian life. It had been an overcast day at the beginning of winter. All day the sky was somber grey and the trees barren of leaves, but the starkness of the surroundings never translated into a sullen mood. Even when the late-afternoon sky darkened and the c
hill in the air grew heavy I found peace in the silence and serenity, and most of all the simplicity of a time that had faded into the past in countries far from the borders of Iran.
This artificially created preserve, as isolated from the current strife as it could be, wasn’t the only opportunity for retreat in Iran’s north. There was also the village of Masouleh, a hamlet of several hundred houses squeezed onto the top of a mountain valley about thirty miles from Rasht. Masouleh has nothing to recommend it except that it is a quiet, timeless, rural hamlet surrounded by a landscape of extraordinary beauty. And then there are the houses.
The entire village of Masouleh was built on a steep hillside that is a waning link of the Alborz Mountains. So steep is the slope and so crowded the construction that the front terrace of one house becomes the roof of the one below it, tier by tier, from the top of the ridge to the valley floor below. Because of the configuration of the town and the tightness of the streets, cars can go no further than a parking lot spread out where the road ends and the village begins. In Masouleh, foot traffic is the only traffic.
Aydin and I had stopped by on a brilliantly bright winter day with low-angled sunlight seeping through the naked branches of the trees that filled the valley. We spent a couple of hours climbing streets that at their narrowest and steepest become staircases cutting through tiers of mud-brick hovels. Rarely was anyone home. After decades of little use, most of the houses had become the seasonal getaways of families that had long ago moved to the urban centers of Tabriz and Tehran, or closer by—to Rasht, Qazvin, or Zanjan. With the arrival of spring the town would reawaken. The Noruz holiday, or Persian New Year, would draw visitors by the thousands: day-trippers, weekenders, and the owners of the homesteads, who would sweep them out to get them ready for weekend visits that would last into the fall.
There was a reason to follow the narrow, twisting road up to Masouleh besides the radiant winter light and remote beauty of the setting. The reason was the girich patterns that decorate many of the doors. Masouleh is estimated to be a thousand years old, and the practice of girich in Islamic art and architecture covers most of that time. A girich pattern consists of interlocking and overlapping geometric designs, usually emanating from a polygon star. The eye of the viewer can organize them an almost infinite number of ways. A girich pattern may be a flat surface, but one that suggests depth and even the mystery of infinity. They are prominent on the wooden window grills of some of the larger houses, and on the balconies overlooking the tiny, postage-stamp squares that dot the town.
Aydin and I sat in the sunlight on the terrace of a restaurant overlooking the valley, sipping tea and slurping on bowls of aash, a thick noodle soup, as the sun sank slowly beyond the ridgeline and the earth-colored façades of the village gradually deepened. A group of Korean backpackers left the ecofriendly hostel on the other side of the street, and other day-trippers gathered at the tables to also drink tea and nurse steaming bowls of aash.
I was glad to be here in the middle of the week in the middle of the winter, because on any summer afternoon or the beginning of Noruz the near-empty lanes would be crammed with curiosity seekers, the terrace tables packed, and the souvenir shops rimming the parking lot and lining the streets leading into the village full to bursting. The lot itself would be chockablock, and cars would be lined up bumper-to-bumper one, even two miles, down the winding road, and the footpaths that began where the town’s lanes ended would be lined with hikers. But all of that was months away. Today was reserved for an Iran of a more quiet, innocent past, and the joy of winter sunlight cutting through barren trees.
“Iranians are like city people anywhere these days,” Aydin said as we basked in the sun. “They spend all week at their desks, and when the weekend comes they want to get out of the city and get some exercise, enjoy the outdoors. Towns like this get a new life.”
I didn’t have any trouble believing this. At the edge of North Tehran, at the Velenjack trailhead, I had walked one of the mountain paths to a viewpoint where a small café was selling drinks and snacks to dozens of other mountain strollers. The ruggedly adventurous continued further, far up into the remote wilderness in the direction of Mount Damavand, at 15,300 feet the highest peak in the Middle East. Iranians have always had an affinity for natural environments, and Persian poetry is packed with natural imagery. In these lines from Rumi, the great Sufi master, nature offers lessons for human life:
Be like the sun for grace and mercy.
Be like the night to cover other’s faults.
Be like running water for generosity.
Be like death for rage and anger.
Be like the Earth for modesty.
Saib Tabrizi, a seventeenth-century poet from Tabriz, also saw the natural world as instructive:
If like the very dew you do not leave the fragrance
Inside the sun’s gaze you will not find a place.
The fourteenth-century writer Hafez could never escape the beauty of the imagery found in nature:
When the wine sun fills the bowls of the East,
It brings to her cheeks a thousand anemones.
The wind breaks ringlets of hyacinth
Over the heads of the roses
As among the meadows I inhale
The fragrance of her rich hair.
Given the political turbulence and economic hardship that is part of day-to-day life, it is easy to understand why many Iranians escape to rural retreats for quick holidays or a simple walk in the woods. There was no escape from the recent political unrest once we were back in the Rasht. As we zipped through streets, a neon sign in the window of a café-restaurant caught my eye: Escape Room.
Aydin dropped me at my hotel, near a large, leafy park, ideal for an end-of-the-day run, and so I donned my Nikes and “Islamically appropriate” workout clothes—long pants for men—and strutted over to the park.
Rumors that there would be demonstrations that night had apparently reached the security services, for all the paths into the park were guarded by black-clad, truncheon-wielding members of the basij, donned in riot helmets and black balaclavas and spaced every forty or fifty feet around the park perimeter. A tough-looking basij commander made the rounds of his forces while communicating with higher-ups via smartphone and radio. It was clear that all of this was to ensure that the park did not become a congregation point for any group seeking to hijack the protests for political ends, particularly any green movement forces emerging from hibernation.
This time, unlike the 2009 postelection riots, the protests caught the government off-guard. What was unusual about these was that they had begun in Mashhad, Iran’s second-largest city, and not exactly a hotbed of antiregime fervor. They quickly spread to Kermanshah, where a recent earthquake had killed more than six hundred residents, and to Qom, Hamedan, and other cities not known for green movement activism. On the contrary, these protestors represented the Iranian heartland, upholders of the status quo who were generally allergic to political upheaval.
Nothing is static or predictable in Iran, surely not protests. Within days the message had changed from protests against corruption to attacks on the character, competence, and even the legitimacy of the Islamic regime. In Rasht and Ramsar, and far north in Ardebil, near the border with Azerbaijan, I watched reports on state-sponsored English-language Press TV in the cozy comfort of my hotel rooms, and the state-funded message, channeled through English-fluent anchors, was true to form: “outside forces” were sowing seeds of dissent, antigovernment agitators wanted to destabilize Iran. Ayatollah Khamenei stated, “In recent days, enemies of Iran used different tools, including cash, weapons, politics, and intelligence services to create troubles for the Islamic Republic.”
This time the problem with the government’s rebuttals was that they were refuting the legitimate gripes of their traditional supporters. One odd twist was that the protests had been stoked not by the remnants of the green movement but hardliners seeking to attack the reformist impulses of President Hassa
n Rouhani. The second odd twist was that latent liberal forces quickly saw an opportunity to voice their own grievances and were able to steer the protests in another direction.
Surprisingly, the activity in the park continued as “normal,” but in Iran “normal” spans a wide spectrum of definitions. Parents amused their children on the playground slides and swing sets. Couples discreetly nuzzled on the benches in the more shadowy recesses of the park where the basij had not ventured, not that they would have bothered with such minor breaches of “Islamic values” anyway. They may even have been glad to see it—more nuzzlers meant fewer protestors. Other runners, out for their evening jaunt, pounded the footpaths with me. I sprinted along the park perimeter, passing basijis cloaked in their antiriot gear. That I was a foreigner, and a Westerner, generated no interest. Far more important was heeding the orders of their commander and eyeballing the residents of Rasht for any spark of rebellion.
As an American in Iran it was refreshing to be dismissed for a change. I finished my laps around the park and then angled through the streets back to the hotel. Again there was a sense of déjà vu, drawing on memories of the 2009 postelection riots. Just a few blocks from the besieged park, life carried on as “normal.” Afterwork shoppers popped into the brightly lit spice shops and grocery stores and other storefronts before making their way home, where news of the demonstrations would receive scant coverage on the state-run broadcasting outlets.
About an hour later Aydin met me in the lobby to head out for dinner at a reputedly good and authentic—he claimed—Italian restaurant. Thursday-night nightlife in Rasht was in full swing. By the time we arrived at the restaurant it was eight o’clock—early for dining in Iran—but a stream of customers was beginning to fill the ground-floor tables. All of the popular social media sites—Snapchat, Twitter, and, most important, Telegram, the message-sharing pathway of choice for Iranian youth—had been blocked. Aydin had downloaded a VPN onto his phone to circumvent the government censors, but still none of the sites would open, and he subscribed to all of them.
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