by Jill Worrall
Unsurprised by our sudden appearance in his workshop, not to mention our nosiness, he explains he is tightening the pile.
We stop to buy tea from a vendor who seems in imminent danger of being swamped by small black mountains of tea leaves. Behind him and to one side shelves rise up bulging with packets of bulk supplies. He tells us he has varieties from all over the world, including Iranian, but very few tea bags.
‘People are going back to loose tea,’ he says, shovelling scrunchy black Ceylonese tea into a packet for us.
There are old-fashioned tea chests here, too, which instantly transport me back to my father’s grocery shop. I look at the foil lining, remembering how you had to be very careful not to rip your fingers on the splintery wood and how, when no one was watching, I would burrow down to my armpits in the tea. As I take a photo the shopkeeper comments to Reza on the number of tourists that take photos of his tea. I ask Reza to explain that we almost never buy loose tea in the West – and rarely see so many varieties in the one shop.
Reza is now looking thoughtfully up and down the darkened alley.
‘I hope I can find the next place I want you to see – it is something very special.’
He ducks in and out of several shops getting a series of conflicting directions, then eventually leads me up a narrow set of stairs between two shops. The smell of tobacco hits me halfway up, and I’m by the time I reach the top I’m engulfed in a pale cloud of smoke.
This is about as serious as an Iranian teahouse gets. There’ll be no orange-flavoured tobacco here; the male-only clientele smoke only the hard stuff: pure unadulterated tobacco.
Beside the stairwell is the tiny kitchen where two men are toiling in the heat generated by a charcoal burner. They are constantly in motion – stirring up the charcoal, transferring it to braziers to distribute among the smokers, pouring streams of hot water into vast teapots and sluicing out the used tea glasses. Watching over all this action is a canary in a cage – how it survives in this atmosphere I don’t know – maybe it functions the same way as a bird down a mine. When it falls off its perch it’s time to air the place out a little.
Along the walls sit the smokers. Almost all are older men in dark jackets or woollen pullovers and though they sit companionably close to their neighbours there is little conversation. Apart from the rattling and clanking from the kitchen, the predominant sound is the gurgle and splutter of several dozen qalyans. Some have little metal hoods placed over their lids of glowing embers – apparently these cut down on the smoke emissions.
When the older of the two men who were in the kitchen sweeps past depositing two cups of tea in front of us, he nods in the direction of his fellow worker and identifies him as his son, the owner of the teashop, who in due course arrives to check our charcoal and pauses briefly to chat.
‘Most of my clients are regulars. Some come in four or five times a day.’ He points to a diminutive old man wearing a fur hat. ‘He has been coming here for sixty years. Most are bazaaris (bazaar shopkeepers) and coming here gives them a break from work, or for some, from life’s hardships. We only allow people of good character in here and cigarette smoking is forbidden. Sometimes poets come and recite their poetry.’
While we watch, one of the smokers stands up stiffly and heads for the door, nodding goodbye to his friends on the way. At the top of the stairs he pauses and stuffs some notes into a charity box affixed to the wall before carefully making his way downstairs, both hands gripped firmly on the banisters.
We follow him soon after. Outside we take gulps of fresh air before making a brief circuit through a semi-open fruit and vegetable market. All the stallholders are shouting out claims and counterclaims about the quality and price of their produce. Trolleys laden with new stock are being pushed through the mêlée. As I take a photo of the scene someone calls out and I turn round to see a shopkeeper smiling at me, clutching the biggest, most knobbly lemons I have ever seen. They would put a good-sized melon to shame.
He’s speaking in Azeri and Reza is having a little trouble translating thanks to the noise and the man’s accent.
‘I think he’s wondering why you are taking photos of trolleys when you can take pictures of his wonderful fruit.’
Beyond the bazaar the streets are a little more orderly. Brightly lit shop fronts are festooned with the latest heavily studded handbags, winter boots with impossibly pointy toes and coats trimmed with false fur.
‘I need a haircut,’ Reza announces. I study his head. There is the slightest suggestion that a few hairs may actually be touching his ears. I wonder about our chances of finding a barber here, at a time of night when most of the shops are starting to close.
But Reza spots the appropriate sign with a small arrow pointing up the stairs above what turns out to be an historic bathhouse about to undergo restoration.
The barber and his assistant are having supper when Reza opens their door but I refuse to step inside until it’s clear that they are happy for me to come in. An outbreak of smiles greets me, along with gestures for me to sit down closest to the heater. While Reza is draped in a towel, the assistant brings me tea and offers me the rest of his bread and cheese. I accept the tea, but decline his meal and only then realise we’ve done the whole thing in mime. The barber’s assistant is a deaf mute.
While Reza’s hair is washed twice and then dried with towels he is plied with questions about me: where do I come from, what Iranian cities do tourists like visiting, what language is spoken in New Zealand. Reza answers them all, his voice slightly muffled from his head being upside down in a basin before being wrapped in a towel. The assistant vigorously dries off his hair and as the barber begins the trim there is a shout from the hall.
The barber opens the door to reveal a man holding a tray of baked goods balanced on one shoulder. The baker and I regard each other over the top of the barber’s head, he with a great deal of astonishment. The barber shrugs nonchalantly, implying that foreign blonde women often call in for tea and a chat. The discussion turns to pastry as the barber selects something from the tray. After salaams all round the barber closes the door and hands me a pistachio-studded macaroon biscuit.
‘He bought it especially for you,’ Reza says.
The assistant beams at me and gestures at the teapot.
I eat the delicate crumbly macaroon while the barber sharpens a cut-throat razor which he then uses to trim Reza’s hairline. He offers him a shave, too, but Reza settles for having a handful of what smells like bay rum massaged into his hair. When it’s time to leave I say goodbye with genuine regret.
Neither of us is keen to return to our hotel. Reza has had another outbreak of budget worries and while the place he chooses appears, on first glance, to be acceptable if somewhat basic it is only after we reach our rooms that we discover all is not as it should be. In my bathroom every fitting leaks, the radiator is stuck on high and the sheets have not been changed while Reza’s room has an overpowering smell of drains. Before we leave to go sightseeing he asks that my sheets be changed – there is little we can do about the rooms’ other shortcomings.
Just a few doors from the hotel we find a brightly lit ice-cream parlour and order ourselves a carrot juice and saffron ice cream each. Three young men in blue camouflage Iranian air force uniforms follow us in and sit nearby drinking banana milkshakes. Before long Reza is in conversation with them and discovers they are from Tehran. They are here doing their military service and it’s their first time away from home. They look so young, partly because all three suffer from various degrees of acne.
‘They are finding it hard here because they don’t understand the language and I sympathise with them,’ Reza tells me.
After finishing our snack there’s nothing for it – it’s time to return to the hotel. We trudge up six flights of stairs to our rooms but when I pull back the bedcover I find that while the bottom sheet has been changed, the new one is dotted with black hairs. I sleep wrapped in a shawl on top of the bed, while the radi
ator tonks and splutters and water from a selection of leaks drips annoyingly out of sync in the bathroom.
When I wake, I look out the window only to see a concrete wall just an arm’s length away. However, when I go downstairs to meet the Rezas at the van, I’m delighted to see that Tabriz is lit by sunshine under blue sky.
We are heading northwest today towards the border with Turkey and deep in the Iranian Azeri heartland. Snow lies thickly on the ground, banked up around the bare trees in the orchards. Poplars line the road and I’m sure I can see the faintest haze of green on their branches but Reza B is doubtful – winter will retain its grip on Azerbaijan for some weeks yet.
The first stop of the day near Sufiyan combines a vital cup of our new tea with a tour of a Saffavid caravanserai. The silk road route that had kept the Tabriz bazaars full passed through Sufiyan on its way to Turkey, the Black Sea and on to Europe. Over the past four years intensive restoration work has been carried out here and in a few months’ time it is due to open as a new luxury hotel. The foreman, who is studying English so that one day he can become a teacher, shows us around. It looks impressive: the bricks have been washed and scrubbed clean of soot and grime, the commercial kitchen is stacked with gleaming stainless-steel appliances still partly wrapped in plastic and a carpenter is putting the finishing touches to a teahouse created from the reservoir in the centre of the courtyard.
I think of some of the abandoned and forlorn caravanserais Reza and I have seen on our travels and wish for a windfall so I could rescue at least one of them in the same way.
Beyond the caravanserai the snow deepens. The landscape is undulating whiteness; everything is moulded and softened by the snow.
The van slips and slides down a track that no one else seems to have travelled on since the last snowfall a few days ago. We are now in the most far-flung western corner of Iran less than 50 km from both the Turkish and Armenian borders. In front of us, rising up behind a high stone wall, is an Armenian church believed to be the last resting place of Thaddeus, disciple of Jesus, who together with fellow disciple Bartholomew is regarded as the founder of Armenian Christianity. Thaddeus is thought to have begun building the first church on the site in about AD66. Although nothing is left of that first church, there are the remains of a 10th-century chapel that has been added to many times over the centuries. It could well be the site of one of the oldest, if not the oldest, churches in the world.
Kalisa-ye Tadi (the Church of Thaddeus) is also known as Qareh Kalisa, or Black Church, because the oldest surviving part is built of black stone. There are two cylindrical towers (one black-and-white striped) topped with conical towers and fortress-like outer walls of rich cream stone. The entire ensemble contrasts dramatically with the blanket of snow.
As we pass through the arched wooden doorway set in the encircling wall, there’s a rumbling sound from the direction of the church followed by a solid thump. Above us, a man is shovelling snow off the roof. The caretaker with us calls up to him, announcing the presence of visitors and presumably asking him not to bury us under an avalanche of snow.
There are some extraordinary carvings on the outer church walls: St George slaying the dragon, gargoyle-like figures with pointy ears and angels with thickly feathered wings.
Armenian and Persian history has been deeply enmeshed throughout the lifetime of this church. In the 17th century, Shah Abbas, the great Persian king, wanted to bring increasing numbers of Armenians from their homeland to work on his new capital of Isfahan as he highly valued their business acumen and craftsmanship, especially with silk textiles.
Reza tells me the story of what happened next as we crunch our way around the church’s exterior walls, dodging clumps of snow cascading from the roof.
‘The Armenians told the king it would be difficult for them to move because they wanted to be close to their holiest cathedral at Echmiadzin (near Armenia’s modern-day capital of Yerevan). Shah Abbas responded by telling them he would move the cathedral stone by stone to Isfahan. The prospect so horrified the Armenians that they agreed to move. Once here, they carved an image of Shah Abbas on the Black Church.’
This church is one of the first places travellers arriving from Turkey stop to visit. Reza tells me it comes as a surprise to many new arrivals that, although only one service is held a year, it is a fully functioning church in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Every year in July, Armenian Christians who have made their homes in Iran make a pilgrimage here and there can be up to 10,000 people camping in the summer meadows that surround the church. No Moslems are allowed to enter the area during the event and none of the women who participate wear hijab.
Priests are kept busy baptising all the new arrivals since the previous year and the pilgrims cleanse themselves of their sins by passing into the church through one of its side doors and out through the other.
Back in the van we snow-plough our way back to the main road and on to the village of Chaldoran, the home of Reza B’s sister Farahnaz, her husband Hassan and their two daughters. Yesterday and early today there had been a flurry of phone calls between the family, many of which seem to involve discussions about the lunch menu.
Our driver’s two nieces, aged 13 and 11, are home even though it’s not yet the Iranian weekend (Thursday and Friday). When there is a shortage of classrooms and teachers, schools often run two teaching sessions a day and as the girls attended a morning session starting at 8.30 am they are now home for the rest of the day. They bring me their English language textbooks and tell me this is the first time they have had a native English speaker with whom they can practise. I wonder what their teacher will think when they arrive back at school with a healthy set of Kiwi vowels.
Our meal, eaten in traditional Iranian style on a tablecloth on the floor, begins with abgusht – a classic Persian soup of mutton, lentils and vegetables and given an edge with the addition of dried limes. This is followed by Tabrizi kufta – a local speciality of meatballs containing rice, split peas and spices. In the centre of each meatball is either boiled egg or dried plum sprinkled with almonds. The meatballs must be boiled for about two hours, making the dish time-consuming to prepare, especially for a large gathering.
This is Persian home cooking at its best but I am struggling to finish because Farahnaz and both Rezas keep piling more food on my plate, which makes both of the girls giggle.
We leave Chaldoran after lunch on a road that crosses a narrow plain, where, Reza explains, an epic battle between the Persian and Ottoman empires was fought in the 16th century. It was won by the Ottomans who used gunpowder technology, a practice the Persians refused to follow, regarding it as inhumane. This conflict defined the border between the two empires right up until the present day.
Our afternoon drive takes us ever closer to the border with Turkey. The van labours up a small pass – pristine snow sparkles on the gentle hills all around us. There is little traffic about and it is the perfect place for a snowball fight. Cunningly I ask Reza B to stop so I can take a photo and once we are all out of the van the rest is easy.... As we plunge through the snow, ducking slushy missiles and panting with the effort, both men comment that mixed snow fights among the unrelated are not common.
Clearly they are not the only ones finding this activity such a novelty. A heavily laden car appears over a small rise in the road and not surprisingly slows down almost to stalling speed on seeing us red-faced, puffing, covered with blobs of snow – and me with the ends of my long scarf trailing in the snow. It putters past us, the windows crammed with incredulous faces.
Just how close we are to Turkey becomes evident when we round a corner a few minutes later to see the cone of its highest mountain, Mt Ararat, rising into an ice-blue sky. Although the low mountains between us and the dormant volcano are entirely blanketed in white, the snow on Ararat seems to have cascaded down from the 5137-metre peak and then frozen in place like white lava.
The drive into the border town of Bazargan takes us through canyons
of columnar basalt – ample evidence that the now-extinct Mt Ararat once wreaked havoc in the region. We are staying the night with Reza B’s brother Ghahreman and his extended family. As is often the case in Iran, a blank nondescript wall reveals an ultra-modern home full of a bewildering array of family and friends.
‘They are having a party for us tonight,’ Reza explains.
Most astonishing of all is the appearance of Reza B’s wife, clearly not Ferengis, the woman with whom we spent three days travelling between Tehran and Mashhad.
In a moment when the tide of visitors abates and Reza and I are briefly on our own I begin a whispered interrogation.
‘Ah yes, well, I hadn’t quite got round to telling you that Ferengis is Reza’s temporary wife. This lady is his other wife. Two of the teenagers you see are his children from this wife.’
At this point wife number one returns to the room and further discussion of Reza B’s clearly complex domestic life is put on hold.
Reza had already explained the concept of temporary marriage to me, but this is my first experience of it. A concept found only in the Shia branch of Islam, it is a practice of which Sunnis in particular disapprove and one that many Westerners struggle to understand. Consequently it’s a subject about which Iranians are a little sensitive.
There is a very comprehensive set of rules surrounding temporary marriage as well as a great deal of debate among Shias about how, and in some cases even if, it should be instituted. Put at its simplest, it works like this: a man may take a temporary wife for a period of time between one hour and 99 years, but if he is already married he must have the permission of his wife. Normally such a union would need the blessing of a cleric, although some people believe it can be legitimised simply by the couple together reciting certain verses from the Koran. Any children born of a temporary marriage are regarded as legitimate and women in such a relationship are also entitled to financial support and even property. A Moslem man may make a temporary marriage with a Christian or a Jew, but a Moslem woman can only enter into this relationship with another Moslem and she must not be a virgin.