Iran: An Introduction Few people realise how huge Iran is. It's half the size of India, four times the area of France, and nearly triple Texas's. Because of this, and especially since most people receive only 2 week visas, few foreigners ever get to do anything but scratch Iran's surface in a single visit. There's just too much to see, too many different regions to consider. A propos which, I point to another little known fact about Iran: it is a successful multinational state. Iran doesn't have India's diversity, but it is probably more diverse than any other country in West Asia. For under the artificial label "Iranian" fall such totally different peoples as Armenians, Azeris, Baluchis, Turkmens, Arabs, Kurds, Luristanis, Pathans, Jews, Zoroastrians, as well as countless nomadic peoples some of whom haven't even been studied yet by anthropologists. Depending on whom you ask, only between 60% to 65% of Iranians are ethnic Persians. The Azeris, Iran's second largest ethno-linguistic group, comprise probably a fifth of the population, making Iran home to more than twice the number of Azeri speakers found in the now independent former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan. But the desingation "ethnic Persian" is not the same thing as "native speaker of Farsi" (the official language of the Islamic Republic of Iran). On the contrary, the latter group make up barely half the population. The much broader designation called ethnic Persian or Pârs is analogous to the Han Chinese. That is, the Persians are the dominant group in Iran, the descendants of Aryan and peoples who built and populated the pre-Islamic Ancient Persia of Persepolis and Pasagardae. Yet just as the Han are not a linguistic unit but a congeries of linguistic groups dominated by Mandarin speakers, so Farsi is the primary but not the exclusive language of ethnic Persians. Speakers of Luri, Mandaranzani, and other related languages (totalling some 10 millions) are also "ethnically Persian" and look upon the non-Persian peoples of Iran as distinct and apart from them. Here is an ethnolinguistic map of Iran. (Note: it's very large.)
Also, a map of Iran with all its provinces demarcated. (Please ignore the mutilated label belonging to the website I stole the map from.)
Some of the provinces are named after its primary ethnic group (Azarbayan, Sistan-va-Baluchestan, Kordestan), but unsurprisingly, most of the minority groups are scattered across several provinces, or their namesake provinces have been partitioned into several different ones in order to divide the peoples. Fars Province is the ancient heartland of the Persian people, the seat of every great Persian empire from the Achaemenians to the Sassanids to the Mongol Timurids. (It's often said implausibly that the other great Persian empire, the Parthians, gave rise to the Hazara or the Harazagi, speakers of Persian in Afghanistan.) OK, now to my own travels in Iran. I arrived in Tehran from Munich with my best friend from university. He's half-German, half-Iranian. (In the stories, I'll refer to his German name, Jens, which he never uses.) Born in Tehran to a German mother and an Iranian father, Jens grew up in the loud, bustling, free-wheeling, glittering, sin-committing decadence of the Shah's Tehran of the 1970s. When the Iranian Revolution broke out in 1979 and the mullahs closed all the international schools in 1980, Jens's parents shipped son & daughter off to Munich to attend school there. Though affluent, the family had never been particularly political and altogether lacked connections to the ancien régime, so they stayed on in Iran as though nothing but the dress code & drinking habits had changed. Although his (beautiful) sister continued to spend every summer in Tehran, Jens himself could not return to Iran until after the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) had ended, for he would have been draughted to fight in that awful butchery which claimed perhaps a million Iranian lives. When the war did finally end, he, along with thousands of other young male Iranian expatriates from Europe and the USA whose families lacked any ties with the Shah's regime, began visiting Iran once again. Although he still lives in Germany, Jens spends most of his annual six-week vacation in Iran. In 1994, I spent a month of my own vacation in Iran at his invitation. Inasmuch as Iran has a standard tourist trail at all, that's pretty much what I stuck to: the bustling megalopolis of Tehran; the glittering, sensual mosques of Esfahan; and the gardens and palaces of hedonistic Shiraz. Shiraz is also the standard staging ground for exploring the Ancient Persian ruins in the surrounding country, including the famed Perspolis, the city of Darius the Great. I also spent a week along the Caspian Sea coast, where I went sturgeon fishing with the locals. Just to put my roving about in context, here is a map which traces the route I took through Iran:
It is probably de rigueur, yet by now approaching platitude, to begin a description of travel to Iran by noting how stereotypes about that country contrast with the reality. Well, I won't do that explicitly and just hope such debunkings will emerge naturally in my reports. At the outset I merely note that the country is extremely, achingly hospitable to foreign visitors; one is free to move about anywhere one wishes; the residual anti-Westernism is now only state ritual, a matter of form, perfunctory and neglected by the populace; and the only danger to Western tourists is being mobbed by a group of overeager Iranian students wishing to practise their English and/or French. I daresay Iran is one of the safest places in the world for Westerners to travel in. Iran as a tourist destination is just not a big deal anymore for anybody except the Americans. Yet even Americans must be able to get visas to the country, for I saw a pair of American tourists while I was there. Of course, Westerners had never stopped visiting Iran. Even in 1994, I saw a few tourists from Germany and France at Persepolis and Esfahan, the two most visited places in the country. They weren't numerous enough to produce crowds, but one saw them in trickles nearly everywhere one went. (Go to Persepolis before it gets mobbed like the ruins in Italy and Greece. Right now, it's still basically deserted, and one can greedily indulge in the whole beautiful shell of Darius's palace nearly alone.) And as evidence that Iran never went to seed as a tourist destination, the locals allege that there was never a year, even in 1979-80, when Japanese tour packages did not grace Iran. |
