by Jill Worrall
Reza and I climb the stairs to emerge into a room with five archways overlooking the gate and the arid landscape beyond. Patchy grass glows slightly orange in the sun – on the horizon a mountain ridge rears up sharply against a cloudless sky.
We look down to see Reza B and Ferengis unpacking lunch.
They’ve set out a picnic on a small tribal rug in an alcove built into the outer wall of the gateway. Thin sheets of Persian bread the size of a tabloid newspaper page lie folded in a plastic bag, and Reza B is busy slicing up cucumbers and tomatoes. Ferengis produces a bowl of potato salad that we spoon into pieces of bread.
I can’t have been eating enough, for both Rezas start handing me rolled-up pieces of bread with a selection of fillings and insisting I eat them. Food is treated very seriously in Iran and plying guests with mountains of food is an essential part of their innate sense of hospitality.
The caravanserai has held us in suspended animation – it is after 3 pm and the winter sun is already slipping behind the walls of the Tarikaneh mosque in Damghan while we wait for the caretaker guard with the keys to be unearthed.
A young man in green army fatigues eventually arrives at a jog and lets us into the courtyard of what is probably the oldest surviving mosque in Iran. It was constructed in about AD760, little more than a hundred years after the Arabs conquered Persia bringing the new religion of Islam with them.
On three sides of the courtyard are arcades of baked brick, while on the fourth is a deep portico of columns, in the centre of which is the mihrab – the niche facing Mecca.
Reza is deeply engrossed taking photographs but I am distracted by the sound of three small boys, clutching notebooks and arguing loudly among the columns.
As we head towards the gateway, the trio follow us. They stop Reza to ask about me – foreign visitors are rare in Damghan.
Once their curiosity is satisfied Reza asks his own questions.
‘They are doing a school project on the mosque but they are having problems,’ Reza says. ‘Do you mind...?’
One of the boys hands over his exercise book and Reza begins to draw a plan of the mosque. The three stand, rapt, and then unconsciously lower themselves to sit on the courtyard floor as their new teacher keeps talking. Reza is now in full cry – even the guard has left his ticket booth to listen. I wonder if the youngsters will become bored, but instead they start firing questions at Reza who by now has also crouched down to draw more diagrams.
Behind the group, late afternoon sunshine is casting shadows across the intricate brickwork of a 10th-century minaret that dominates the skyline beside the mosque. A thousand years ago builders had painstakingly used the bricks to form geometric patterns and the words in angular calligraphy that spelled out verses from the Koran.
Reza finishes his impromptu lecture and his three young students thank him solemnly. The sunset call to prayer is beginning as we walk through the courtyard of the nearby Friday mosque, in search of two 11th-century tomb towers. Reza B is in the courtyard, carefully washing his arms and hands in preparation for joining the prayers.
The towers are circular, with conical tops – they look like stubby rockets. Here, too, the top sections are adorned with decorative brickwork. We climb a wall for a better view and look down on the local rubbish tip – a sea of plastic bags and rotting vegetation laps around the base of one of the towers that has been standing since just before the Norman conquest of Britain in 1066.
As we walk back towards the van, a motorcycle roars up behind us. The rider glances briefly at us, and then seeing me, turns back again for another look.
‘For him you are the tourist attraction, not the towers,’ Reza says.
Now staring at me over his shoulder, the motorcyclist continues to ride at speed towards a pile of rubble in the road. Just in time he turns around, sees the hazard and swerves wildly. He misses the stones by centimetres but instead nearly wipes out the display of oranges and apples outside a small fruit shop wedged between two crumbling, uninhabited ruins. Built of rough bricks held together by globs of mortar that had oozed down the walls before solidifying, the mere sight of this shop would be enough to make the craftsmen who built the tomb towers spin in their graves.
Damghan was once known as Hecatompylos during the Parthian dynasty that followed the collapse of Alexander the Great’s Selucid empire.
‘We know very little about the Parthians, which is very mysterious because they created the longest dynasty in Iranian history. They ruled this land from 161BC to AD224,’ Reza explains. ‘They were probably an Indo-European people who originated from the eastern side of the Caspian Sea – they never had a centre of power or capital because they remained nomadic warriors.’
Back in Parthian times, Damghan was an important staging post on the journey between Central Asia and the Mediterranean.
Business is not so brisk these days. The fruiterer calls out to us as we pass and points to his boxes of oranges. His shop is freezing cold and he is wearing a beanie and mittens. As soon as he has put the fruit into a bag for us he tucks his hands under his armpits to keep them warm.
It is dark when we arrive in Shahrood. We are spending the night with Reza’s uncle and aunt but they are still on the road, returning from a pilgrimage to Mashhad.
We eat dinner in a tourist inn while we wait for them. Reza has to coerce the waiter into finding the cook as it is an hour before the restaurant usually opens. However, Reza convinces him that four early customers are better than possibly none at all later.
As we pull up outside the wall of Uncle Hamid and Auntie Fariba’s house, Reza gives me some advice.
‘My aunt is very religious so you may need to keep your head scarf on this evening. And unlike many Iranians, my uncle has decided to return to living in a traditional house rather than a modern one. Do you think you will be OK?’
The headscarf was not a problem, but I begin to worry just how traditional the bathroom and toilet arrangements might be. Born with a hip deformity that has now turned arthritic I find Asian-style toilets can be a challenge depending on how my hip is feeling at the time. Unwilling to have an in-depth discussion with Reza on the subject, I try to keep my worries to myself. I’d mastered the no-toilet-paper regime, but squatting for any length of time (and one drinks a lot of tea in Iran) can be torture if not downright impossible at times, necessitating some complex and time-consuming contortions.
I realise that night that I’d not hidden my fears, or my prolonged trips to the toilet, very well. This is the first of many occasions on which I’d open the bathroom door to find Reza nearby feigning interest in a flower, a stretch of wall, or sometimes merely the sky.
‘Is everything all right?’ he’d ask.
The family’s house is built around a traditional Persian courtyard that contains fruit trees, a grapevine and small pond. There is a takt (a throne or square platform covered with carpets and bolsters) on which to sit when drinking tea and at each of several doors into the house is the usual jumble of footwear.
A vast Persian carpet covers the entire living-room floor and although there’s a television in the corner, there are no seats other than cushioned niches set into the walls. A gas heater hisses in the corner.
Hamid, a serious-looking man, ushers us into the room. He studied as an interior designer, then became an archaeological restorer at the National Museum of Iran in Tehran. Later, he founded a museum in Shahrood and before his retirement was the region’s Cultural Heritage and Tourism Organisation director with a special interest in archaeology, anthropology and ethnography. And to top all that, he is also an expert on calligraphy work on clay and has led several archaeological excavations.
Fariba, Reza’s aunt, appears from the kitchen, a white-sprigged chador pulled over a long dress and a headscarf tied around her round face with its ready smile. She is the director of a vocational training centre in Shahrood. Once again I’d let dangerous preconceptions creep into my assessment of Iranian women – I’d assumed a woman w
ho was a devout and regular pilgrim would almost certainly be a stay-at-home wife. I was annoyed at myself. I’d not have made the same assumption at home, so why had I done it here?
Reza’s connections with Shahrood stretch back further than his uncle in that his great-grandfather worked as an architect here and some of the buildings he designed were still in use, including the town’s museum.
‘During the war with Iraq, we came here as a family when I was about ten years old to escape the Scud missiles that were falling on Tehran,’ Reza says.
‘I can remember one of the missiles falling before we left for Shahrood; it came down near our house and made the windows shake. We spent a month here in my great-grandfather’s house, which had a big garden. I have very happy memories of it.’
Fariba tells Reza that I should take off my headscarf. I decline. They insist. I decline again, but am overruled a third time.
‘This is your home tonight so we want you to feel comfortable,’ his uncle says. I retreat to another room to revive my flattened, lifeless hair – if it is to be exposed I want it to look respectable.
Hamid and Fariba’s two sons are introduced. I struggle a little to believe they are brothers: Hamed is thin, almost gaunt, with a full black beard, his brother Wahid is rather rotund and clean-shaven. While Wahid happily practises his English on me his older brother is more reserved, and seems reluctant to look at me. I suspect it is my lack of a head covering and wish I could put my headscarf back on.
Reza begins to tell his uncle about our exploration of Iran’s caravanserais and there is a flurry of activity as maps and textbooks are dug out and spread out on the carpet. While we eat pistachios, walnuts, oranges and a box of chocolates I’ve brought with me, Hamid points out not-to-be-missed caravanserais.
The conversation is now in rapid Farsi and I’ve long been left behind, but I am aware that suddenly Reza is looking especially animated and his uncle has disappeared before returning bearing another book.
‘I never knew this before,’ Reza says, ‘but my uncle has made a study of graffiti on caravanserai walls. Old graffiti, very old – some of it was probably written four hundred years ago. He has found the transcripts for us.’
Over a period of many months Hamid had scrambled through the caravanserais in northeastern Iran, often working by just the light of a torch, to peer at walls and staircases for signs of ancient graffiti.
‘So many of the caravanserais are in bad condition and many are still being vandalised and others are being restored and cleaned, so I knew if I did not do this soon some of this history would be gone for ever,’ he says. ‘I found two hundred and fifty-five pieces of graffiti written between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.’
While we sip tea, Reza begins to translate the graffiti, every now and then making small exclamations of delight.
‘Listen to this:
What kind of serai is this world
We are just guests here
So, don’t be proud
Because we are guests,
In both worlds
Only God is immortal
Apart from that everything is mortal.’
Someone, maybe unable to sleep as he lay in the caravanserai while a desert wind howled outside or the bricks sizzled in the midday sun, had been mulling over life and death, and had inscribed his poem into the stones.
How far was the writer from home, I wonder? Had loneliness, or homesickness, or fear of the journey that lay ahead inspired him?
The fleeting nature of life seemed to preoccupy many of the writers. One was to the point on the subject: ‘I don’t stay but my
writing does.’
Another was more pragmatic:
‘Tell me what I have acquired
Under this dust
Only vanity
Although I have left this
Graffiti in black ink.’
We continue to leaf through Hamid’s collection of writing (including an intriguing silk route version of Kilroy’s ‘I was here’, written by an Ashraf Anasar Begum ‘an inhabitant of Azamibad’ (a begum is a Moslem woman of rank) and the photographs of barely discernible writing that he’d found in shadowed recesses and along crumbling staircases. Reza nudges me.
‘My god, this is a real poet, let me translate very carefully:
Because I was parted from you
I built houses everywhere
And I created the mud of those houses
With the blood of my heart.’
3
SUNSET WITH THE POETS
Shahrood to Mashhad
And in the temple of mine in most soul,
Behold the Friend; Incomparable Love.
He who would know the secret of both worlds,
Will find the secret of them both, is Love.
Attar, 12th–13th century Persian poet from Neyshabur, near Mashhad
Our living room of last evening, which became my bedroom overnight (I find sleeping on the floor surprisingly comfortable), serves as our breakfast room this morning.
I had hoped to be able to awaken early enough to use the bathroom (complete with Western-style toilet) before the rest of the family was up and worrying if I was either too hot or cold, needed toilet paper, had enough towels, hot water, or other essentials.
It was not their kindness I wanted to escape, but the nagging worry that I might be perceived as a demanding and pampered Westerner.
But pre-dawn prayers had given at least one person a flying start. The light is on in the bathroom, and the gas heater is roaring (natural gas is sold at almost giveaway prices in Iran thus worrying about heating bills doesn’t seem to be an Iranian preoccupation as it is at home). I’ve no sooner stepped into the sauna-like conditions than I hear Reza’s voice outside telling me he’s been sent across the courtyard with another towel.
Breakfast is a leisurely meal for the whole family: dates, butter, cream, and fried eggs and the ubiquitous Persian bread bought fresh from the neighbourhood bakery.
I am surprised to see Reza’s uncle and aunt getting ready to leave the house with us.
‘Oh, I forgot to tell you,’ Reza says. ‘The girls at my aunt’s institute have been asked to come in early so you can see their pottery before we leave for Mashhad.’
Six of us pile into Uncle Hamid and Auntie Fariba’s small Peugeot. Unlike at home, where it is now illegal to have more passengers than seatbelts, regulations are a little more relaxed in Iran. It seems perfectly natural to have one of Reza’s cousins all but sitting on his knee in the front passenger seat and three of us wedged tightly in the back. We also have several pieces of our luggage in with us because we are meeting Reza B at Auntie Fariba’s Institute.
The Iranian Vocation and Technical Educational Organisation is a near-new two-storeyed structure with light streaming through the high windows of the pottery studios. About eight girls wearing white lab coats and simple black wimple-style headscarves are already at work. They don’t appear at all resentful that I’ve caused them to have to get out of bed an hour earlier than usual.
The girls are making vases, candle-holders and plaques from local clay and in many cases are following designs created by the multi-talented Uncle Hamid. Using tiny spatula-type tools, the girls working on plaques are carefully cutting out curling pieces of clay to create swirling calligraphy and abstract designs reminiscent of decorations found on mosques and minarets.
They like being at the institute, they tell me, and hope when they are qualified to be able to go back to their villages and neighbouring towns and make a living from their pottery.
‘I want to be a potter for some time before I get married,’ one of the girls tells me firmly.
Reza’s aunt is clearly a much-respected role model. When we go to say goodbye to her she is seated behind a huge and immaculately tidy desk while Wahid kneels beside her, carrying out repairs to her computer.
Reunited with Reza B and Ferengis, we leave Shahrood for the 300-kilometre drive to Mashhad. We break o
ur journey, much the way a caravan could have done 400 years ago, at the Miami caravanserai.
The branch of the silk route that ran between Mashhad and Tehran had been a particularly well-used one as it skirted the great inhospitable deserts to the south. Its popularity attracted unwelcome attention. We climb up on to the roof and are struck by the sturdiness of the watchtowers in each corner – protection from bandits was a crucial function of the building, hence its sole massive double door and windowless outer walls.
Nowadays the town of Miami has crept up to the caravanserai walls and to one side of the main door a fruit and nut vendor has set up an al fresco stall. Two wizened old men in black beanies, both leaning their chins on wooden walking sticks, sit beside him, occasionally scooping handfuls of walnuts from the sacks between them.
Although many caravanserais have quietly turned to rubble, a select few are being restored, either by the Iranian government’s Cultural Heritage and Tourism Organisation or by private investors in partnership with the organisation.
Miandasht caravanserai is one of the lucky ones. It’s a vast 18,000sqm complex consisting of a rare Qajar (19th century) and two Safavid (16th–17th century) caravanserais, all linked by tall arched gateways. It would have been capable of housing hundreds of travellers. Outside its fortified walls are stables that would have once held their camels. Its popularity was due to its prime location – Miandasht was a silk-route crossroads as well as a place for pilgrims to stay as they travelled to and from Mashhad. From Miandasht one could take a route around the end of the Alborz mountains direct to the Caspian Sea and from there head for Turkey, the Caucasus and even Russia, or stay to the south of the mountains and press on for Rey (near modern-day Tehran) and south to Iraq.