by Jill Worrall
‘Why do they come here?’ he says looking at me. ‘What is its value?’
Reza looks mildly horrified that this local lad clearly has no idea about the ziggurat’s importance and launches into an impromptu lecture to which the teenager listens intently. I have seen this before – Iranians of all walks of life appear to be genuinely interested in their country’s history, positively thirsty for information to the extent that they often tag on to the back of tour groups to listen to Reza’s explanations.
We hear the sound of our van start – Reza B is hinting it was time to leave. The shepherd says goodbye and returns to his flock.
‘That is sad,’ Reza says. ‘I think he is quite an intelligent boy, but he’s dropped out of school because his uncle needs him to help with their three hundred sheep.’
Some of the only other remnants of the Elamites lie in Susa, further to the north.
The capital of their empire for about 300 years, Susa is best known as the winter headquarters of the Achaemenid emperors. It was very handily placed, being about halfway between Babylon and Persepolis.
However, after Alexander the Great swept into Susa in 330BC, followed by the depredations of subsequent rulers, little now remains of what was once a majestic city renowned as far away as Greece.
What is left sits perched on a hill and comprises the foundations of several palaces, a few pillars and some beautiful, almost intact, giant horses’ heads made of stone. The small museum on the site contains bronze masks and fertility figurines found locally, but considering the expanse of history represented outside it is a somewhat sparse collection.
‘If you are wondering where most of the artefacts that were found here have ended up,’ Reza remarks, ‘the answer is that the early twentieth-century Qajar king of the day made a deal with the French who did most of the excavations that everything that was not actually gold or silver could be taken out of the country. So many precious things such as a fantastic glazed tile lion frieze and a bull’s head capital are now in the Louvre rather than here. It was a very ignorant decision because of course it is not just gold and silver objects that are priceless.’
Ironically, the most eye-catching building at Susa now is a 19thcentury castle built as a base for the French Archaeological Service during their excavations and which was inspired by the Bastille in Paris.
Khuzestan is ethnically less homogeneous than many other regions of Iran and is more influenced by Arab culture than almost any other part of the country. Although Arabs make up only about 5 per cent of the entire Iranian population, the proportion is about 85 per cent in Khuzestan. The region is also home to many Kurds, about five million of whom live in Iran, mostly in the west.
We are going to be spending the night in the town of Andimeshk with a family that typifies this ethnic diversity. Hojjat Shams had befriended Reza B during the war and when he was given leave from the front Reza often stayed with him. It was a brief respite from the terrors of war and the two men have remained friends ever since. Hojjat is half Kurd and half Lor and is in business (but what kind of business is never made clear to me) while Senober, his Kurdish wife, although trained as a natural science teacher is now at home looking after their three-year-old son, Ali.
Reza B tells us a Lor joke before we arrive, the Iranian equivalent of Irish jokes.
‘A Lor gets on a bus. Everyone around him goes to sleep. The Lor walks up to the driver and asks, “Why are you still driving? Everyone is asleep!”’
Hojjat, Senober and Ali live in an apartment above a row of shops. A staircase leads from street level to a small terrace off which opens a bathroom and a door to the main apartment that consists of a large open-plan living room and kitchen and a separate master bedroom.
Reza B takes my bag straight into the bedroom. I tell him I hate the idea of my hosts being thrown out of their bedroom for me.
‘It is their honour and their duty to you as their guest,’ Reza B says firmly.
‘Where will everyone else sleep?’ I ask. Reza waves his arm vaguely around the living room
‘There is plenty of room.’
Senober produces refreshments for us – a bowl of fruit and glasses of tea which we consume sitting on a very new lounge suite. However, dinner – kebabs cooked by Hojjat in the courtyard – is served in traditional style, i.e. on a large plastic tablecloth spread over one of the two vast Tabriz-style carpets they’d been given as wedding presents.
After dinner, Ali is whisked into the bedroom and his jeans and T-shirt exchanged for a miniature version of traditional Kurdish dress comprising a pale grey jumpsuit with a black-striped cummerbund and on his head a tiny pillbox hat embroidered with black and white geometric designs. Little he might have been but he is already familiar with a number of dance moves that he demonstrates to us, his admiring audience.
On hearing that the Shams have guests numerous relatives call in for a chat. But surrounded by incomprehensible conversations and with my every move scrutinised by strangers, I am suddenly hit by waves of exhaustion – my vision is blurry and I’m dizzy with tiredness. The Rezas have become family – travelling with them represents normality, the warmth of the familiar – but at this moment I feel very alone and badly dislocated.
I excuse myself to tackle the local toileting arrangements; always a battle with my unco-operative hip. Feeling sorry for myself I weep briefly over the outside basin while cleaning my teeth. Back in the living room Ali has gone to sleep on a cushion and the men are lounging nearby absorbed in conversation. Senober is in the kitchen bottling enormous plastic jars of pickles.
‘Hojjat can eat a jar of these in one day so then I have to keep making more,’ she says as she hauls a huge pan of spiced vinegar from the stove. I ask if I can help but she is horrified by the thought.
‘No, no, you are a guest!’ she laughs.
I go to bed.
Next morning I feel ashamed that my mini-collapse last night might have been viewed as impolite. Determined to get a grip I venture out of the bedroom to find Senober asleep on the kitchen floor, Ali curled up beside her. I’m aghast. The three men start to stir from their mattresses on the living room floor.
While I’m washing my face in the courtyard Reza emerges.
‘It’s awful that Senober had to sleep on the kitchen floor while I slept in her bed. I understand about the importance of hospitality but that is too much,’ I hiss at him.
Reza is upset.
‘It is our custom, please don’t worry about it,’ he says, a little stiffly.
He turns away and goes back inside. I guess it is appropriate in this area where memories of war are so raw that I had stomped into a minefield of my own making. And I had certainly not emerged covered with glory.
As we say goodbye to the family Senober pushes up her sleeve and before I can stop her she unfastens a turquoise bracelet and puts it around my wrist. I feel ashamed once more that I had not insisted on keeping her company in the kitchen.
Today’s drive will take us to Kermanshah, located in a bulge of Iranian territory that protrudes into nearby Iraq. Almost due west of us, only a few hundred kilometres away, is the deeply troubled and violent city of Baghdad. Although war now restricts trade between Iraq and Kermanshah it used to be a different story. For centuries Kermanshah had been a trading centre along the silk roads and was strategically placed on what was known as the Royal Road that linked the Achaemenid capital of Ecbatana (modern-day Hamadan where we will stay tonight) to Babylon.
The contrast between the chaos of Baghdad and the panorama of velvety green pastures and lonely but peaceful low hills of barren rock is a stark one.
With no scheduled stops planned Reza declares it time for some intensive Persian lessons and as the van hums along the road we sing rhymes designed to imprint Persian numbers on my mind. As usual, Reza B conducts, both hands off the wheel rather more than they should be.
Kermanshah is one of the biggest cities in western Iran with a population of about 700,000. When we reac
h the street leading to our central city hotel it appears that all 700,000 have brought their cars to town for the evening.
About eight lanes of traffic are gridlocked at the entrance to the street that leads to our hotel. An area beyond the street has been blocked off to provide parking and so while on the one hand there are several hundred cars trying to get into the street, on the other there is an equal number trying to get out. It is the traffic jam from hell, made worse by almost every driver’s belief that if he honks his horn loudly enough, the sea of cars will part in Biblical fashion before them. Iranian drivers are usually refreshingly free of any inclination towards road rage, but this piece of motoring hell pushes a few drivers over the edge. Some cars are abandoned altogether while their occupants get out to argue with other drivers about who should move where.
Several passers-by thump the sides of our van, which makes Reza B’s moustache bristle dangerously. After some minutes of going nowhere Reza gets out and threads his way through the chaos to find the hotel and maybe even a porter to help us. I find his optimism particularly endearing given there is barely room between the cars to fit one person, turned sideways.
Reza B and I contemplate the scene in silence until a man wearing a dark uniform with white belt and shoulder holster bangs on Reza’s B window. Muttering quietly he opens it and a heated exchange follows.
Apparently we are in the parking queue and we have to move to the left to get into the lane that goes past the hotel. My newly acquired ability to count to 1000 in Farsi is no help at this point.
To the left of us is a sea of vehicles, just as stuck as we are. The policeman is now blowing his whistle stridently and gesticulating at Reza B. As the man has a gun, I resist the temptation to gesticulate back at him.
‘Where does he expect us to go?’ I ask.
The van suddenly lurches. A group of motorists, inspired not so much by goodwill as by the thought that if we are out of the way they’ll be able to move, is physically lifting our van out of the wedge of vehicles. Nearby others are doing the same with the remaining cars in our path.
Car by car, the jigsaw of tightly locked vehicles is rearranged and miraculously we emerge in a narrow but clear stretch of road between two rows of angle-parked vehicles.
‘We’ll never find a park after all this,’ I say. Reza B doesn’t bother replying as he turns into a space occupied by Reza who has been repelling would-be invaders. A porter stands beside him.
After we offload, we go in search of dinner on foot. Outside the hotel the cacophony of shouting, blaring horns and penetrating police whistles is unabated and as we carefully thread our way through the shambles to a side road, I tell Reza I am on a one-night strike from kebabs and hamburgers. Luck is on my side because after only a few minutes’ walk we find a pizza parlour with gleaming floors and tables that passes his hygiene standards.
The owner is so surprised to see a tourist at the counter that he bounces up from the till, asks me to take a seat and tells Reza he’ll personally come over and consult on my choice of pizza toppings.
In due course a delicious pizza arrives and we tuck in. Our host makes frequent visits to our table to check on us, on one occasion begging Reza to tell me that he would happily have cooked me anything I wanted, including Chinese or Italian, but he was so surprised when we came in that he forgot to say so.
I assure him in my stumbling Farsi that his is the best pizza I’ve eaten for ages. But when we try to pay, Reza has to exceed the usual amount of taroffing before he will accept the money.
When we return to the hotel the street is all but deserted – our van is one of the few vehicles in sight.
Iranian winters might be harsh in most regions, but most homes and hotels are heated to the extent that I often find bedrooms in particular too warm. My Kermanshah hotel room is one of these and annoyingly it appears that the windows are fused shut and I can find no way to turn off the radiator. It is a long hot night, punctuated by the sounds of a constantly dripping tap in the bathroom and I am only too pleased when the pre-dawn call to prayer tells me it’s time to get up.
Although Kermanshah’s unheralded claim to fame is probably the world’s worst traffic jams the city is better known for a nearby cliff of bas reliefs that were carved during the fourth century at the command of the Sassanian kings.
Carved into grottoes at the base of the dramatically barren and deeply gashed cliff, the sculptures at Taq-e-Bostan are first glimpsed from across an ornamental lake of milky blue water fringed with trees.
The massive figures represent the coronations of Sassanian kings Khosro II and Ardeshir II. The Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda is also depicted as is the god Mithras who stands on a lotus flower, both sporting curling beards and luxuriant moustaches.
Two stone carved angels with draperies clinging to their legs float over one of the scenes and the walls around the bas relief of Khorsho are covered in wonderfully lively hunting scenes featuring elephants, horses, stags and wild boars.
While we are studying the sculptures a party of about 20 schoolgirls accompanied by a young woman teacher arrives. Aged about 12, the girls sit down on the shallow step in front of the grottoes while their teacher begins to describe the events carved into the walls more than 1500 years ago. The girls watch her with rapt attention – there is no giggling or fidgeting and even the arrival of a couple of custodians wielding huge twig brooms does not distract them. In their minds they are back in the time when their ancestors defeated the Roman Empire and when their long-dead kings received their crowns in person from the gods. However, it’s time for us to go and we leave them to their lesson.
We’re now travelling through along a fertile valley flanked by snow-covered mountain ranges to the village of Bisotun where we stop to visit Iran’s equivalent of the Rosetta stone. After scrambling up a narrow track 60 metres above the road, we find, carved into a sheer rock face, the fabled words of the Achaemenian king Darius I, who in 520BC ordered them to be carved here after he’d defeated a rival ruler and quelled some serious rebellion among eight other would-be kings. Alongside is a bas relief of Darius I with his foot on the body of the defeated king; the eight rebels are chained together nearby.
The inscription is written in ancient Persian cuneiform, a language that no one had been able to decipher until Englishman Henry Rawlinson cracked the ancient code in 1838. Alongside the tablet or panel are versions of the same text in Elamite and Babylonian that were carved at the same time.
When Rawlinson came here in the 19th century he was helped by two Kurdish children to lower himself and his young helpers down the cliff on ropes where they spent countless hours carefully transcribing the incomprehensible Persian cuneiform. Then, working with the Elamite and Babylonian texts (ancient languages that had been deciphered earlier) Rawlinson was able to translate the words for the first time. In doing so he also provided the key to understanding many other hitherto indecipherable inscriptions, making the ancient inscription something of an Iranian equivalent of the Rosetta stone.
Because of their immense archaeological value, these three panels can now only be accessed close up by the privileged few, but I don’t need to get any closer because Reza translates the script for me. He is one of only a few modern-day Iranians who has learned both old and middle Persian (a later version of the same language).
‘It’s a very informative story – especially as it is actually Darius who is speaking to us. He talks about the rebels and traitors and how he, Darius, had stopped the rioting in different parts of the empire.’
We turn around to look out across the valley. At the base of the cliff is a small lake created by a natural spring.
‘Imagine looking at this when it was the royal road which also led to a Zoroastrian temple, a trading route – and from Islamic times it has been a pilgrimage trail to holy sites in Iraq,’ Reza says. ‘It was a very clever place to put this inscription. Anyone passing by would have stopped and seen the picture and read the words – and because it is in t
hree different languages they would instantly have appreciated the might and power of the king.’
The snow on the mountain range to the south shimmers in the sunshine. The spring waters tumble from the lake and gurgle down a serpentine series of channels created to provide Persia’s picnickers of today with plenty of choice spots. Reza murmurs words of ancient Persian as he uses the telephoto lens of my camera to zoom in on the inscriptions. Even after so long on the road, so many thousands of kilometres, Iran continues to astound me with its spectacular, albeit sometimes stark and uncompromising, landscapes. I realise, too, how privileged I am to have the country’s essence uncovered for me by an exceptional Iranian like Reza, who chooses this very minute to announce that it is time for a cup of tea.
On the outskirts of Bisotun, as we head towards Hamadan, I spot a building of now very familiar design with its domed roof and lofty single gateway. This caravanserai would have been a popular spot back in its heyday, strategically located as it is on what was both a pilgrimage and trading route. But today there is no trade with Iraq and the few pilgrims who still persevere with the dangerous mission of crossing the border stay in hotels en route. The caravanserai has been converted into a cinema.
Travelling in the wake of kings and pilgrims, caravan camels and invaders, we follow the road to Hamadan. Another of Iran’s ancient capitals, it has its share of attractions but we are there primarily to support Reza on a personal mission which involves collecting his master’s degree in ancient Persian languages from the city’s Bu Ali Sina University. He’s been working on this degree for some years, fitting in his studying around tours, travelling the five hours between Hamadan and Tehran by public bus late at night and sleeping in temporary accommodation at the university. It wasn’t possible for him to attend the graduation ceremony because he’d been away with a tour group when it took place.
The university is a modern complex set in a sprawling campus of trees and lawns on the outskirts of the city. We park outside the registry and Reza goes inside, only to return a short time later empty-handed.