I started my New Year vacation laying in the large tub at the hummum, pouring Barf into the water, and washing my clothes. In Persian, barf meant 'snow,' and it was the brand name of a popular laundry detergent. A notice on the side of each box said, "For the cleanest clothes and dishes, always use pure gentle Barf!"
Around Ahar, the students started wearing their new clothes; even the poorest seemed to have something to show off. New clothes for New Year was an Iranian tradition. And the bank had new money; freshly minted shiny coins and uncirculated paper currency. The post office buckled under the flood of greeting cards. Often the men had their pictures taken and the photographer made them into holiday cards that they sent to their friends. Special sweets and cookies filled the confectioner's shops. New Year was the happiest of all the holidays in Iran and everyone enjoyed it.
On the evening of Panj-Shanbay-Suri, people built small fires in empty places around the city. The men laughed and joked with each other as they celebrated the ancient tradition of jumping over the flames; a rite that supposedly cleansed the spirit for the new year. Religious leaders grumbled and called it a pagan ritual, which it was. Other remnants of pre-Islamic Iran had survived into the present. Of the twelve months in the Iranian calendar, Ordabahesht, Khordad, Esfand, and Amordad took their names from Zoroastrian gods. The ceremonies of the New Year came largely from that same Zoroastrian tradition and throughout Iran, Islam either absorbed or coexisted with remnants of that ancient faith. New Year usually fell on March twenty-first or twenty-second, depending on the exact time of the equinox, just the way the Zoroastrians celebrated it many centuries before.
On one special evening a few days before New Year, men dressed in women's clothes and went to the houses of their neighbors. The men knocked on the doors and asked for gifts of candy or food. It was a custom reminiscent of Halloween, except that in Iran the adult men did the 'trick-or-treating," not the children.
I packed my clean clothes in a small bag and left Ahar for Tabriz, then on to the south where I met Alex in Ahwaz, a city hear the head of the Persian Gulf. We planned to travel together during the fortnight-long holiday.
After looking at the agricultural college in Mola-Sani, a suburb of Ahwaz, where Alex taught, we traveled north stopping first at Choge-Zambiel. There we looked at an ancient ziggurat; a pyramid made of mud brick built thousands of years ago, like those in Ur and throughout Messopotamia. Cuneiform inscriptions decorated many of the bricks that remained and the Iranian government kept a guard on the site to stop people from vandalizing and pillaging the place. From a pile behind his sentry post, the guard quietly sold samples that he had taken while nobody watched him.
We traveled to Isfahan, spending a morning looking at the beautiful Shah Mosque and other outstanding buildings that make that city one of Iran's most beautiful. There is truth in the Persian saying that declares, "Isfahan is half of the world."
Isfahan is known for the Khaju Bridge
The Ali Gapu or magnificant Gate
In this picture I am standing inside the ali Gapu looking out at the Shah Mosque in the distance
Isfahan is a tourist destination, and here locals make decorated copper plates and bowls to sell.
Here is another more dramatic view of the bridge.
We had difficulty securing bus tickets because so many people traveled during New Year, but finally managed to go on east to Yazd which sits on the edge of the Great Desert.
Among other things, Yazd was noted for its huge bazaar which the government had started building years before. Workers cleared an area in the center of the city and built a façade decorated with colored tiles and tall minarets like the front of a mosque. But nobody moved out of the old bazaar, and so the new structure stood alone in the middle of an empty area looking like an ornate wall with nothing around it.
Yazd contained Iran's largest Zoroastrian community. These people, who believe that water, air, fire, and earth are holy, refuse to bury their dead but instead put them on the open ground inside of walled enclosures out in the desert. We visited one, but found it guarded by men put there to keep out tourists like ourselves.
From Yazd we went farther east to Kerman where we managed to find space in a dormitory-like room in a crowded hotel, and where we met Hossein and his teen-age son, also named Hossein. To differentiate, everyone called the boy "Hossein Piss-ar." Piss-ar means 'boy' in Persian, and Hossein is roughly the equivalent of John, so the son was 'John-boy.' The father liked us, for some reason, and Alex and I enjoyed talking to him. They had also decided to travel during the holiday and in Kerman we stayed together in the large room with five beds.
Wind towers in Kerman catch soft breezes and divert them down
to rooms below ground level keeping them cool in the hot summer.
Hossein the father, gregarious and talkative, took us under his wing.
"People will cheat you because you are Americans," he said. "I will help and together we will see the places of interest."
More than anywhere else, we wanted to see Mahan, a small oasis a few miles outside of town where Shah Me'matollah Vali built an exquisite blue mosque centuries ago. Hossein recommended that we hire a private taxi for the trip. He told us to hide so that the driver would not see us and inflate his price. Then he flagged down a taxi, and haggled with its owner. They kept at it for almost half an hour.
"It is going to cost a little more than I had hoped," he said when he came to us. "It will be about one hundred toman for the trip and we must be back early in the afternoon."
"No problem," we said.
When the taxi driver saw Alex and me he started arguing with Hossein. He shouted that he could have gotten two hundred toman from Americans. He called Hossein a few names and said that he was a traitor to his countrymen. Then the man drove us to Mahan. Once made, a bargain became an honor and it had to be fulfilled no matter how unhappy it made someone.
After Kerman we turned south and went to the port city of Bandar Abass on the Persian Gulf. The city's open air bazaar on the beach featured fish, exotic clothes, and goods smuggled in from free ports up and down the coast. Vendors openly displayed American cigarettes, especially Winstons. The Iranian government held a monopoly on tobacco and while the black market made other brands available, the vendors usually kept them hidden. We saw toys, clothes, tape recorders, other electric appliances, silks, and Honda motor bikes. Most of this came through the Island of Qshm which lay a few miles off the coast of Bandar Abass, in the Strait of Hormoz.
A camel walks along the beach at Bandar
Abass I get my feet wet in the Strait of Hormoz near Bandar
Abass
A man with his water pipe on an Arab dhow sailing toward the Island of Qshm
Alex and I took a day trip out to the island on a dhow - a small Arab boat with a large white sail. On returning we had to go through Iranian customs, but small gifts of money, openly handed to smiling officials, made the event quick and perfunctory. The whole economy of the city apparently depended on the availability and sale of foreign merchandise which would have been heavily taxed elsewhere in Iran.
The women along the hot gulf coast wore black masks rather than full body chadores. Many of the people were Arabs, not Persians. They used separate facilities, attended their own schools, and lived in segregated sections of the city. The Iranians of Persian descent looked down on the Arabs; Iranians are of Indo-European heritage and are not a Semitic people like the Arabs. Mostly poor and dirty, the Arab population of Bandar Abass, many of whom had dark brown or even black skin, sat at the bottom of the Iranian social scale. This treatment of the Arab minority throughout the south of Iran contributed in part to the Iran-Iraq war during the 1980s.
From Bandar Abass I flew to Shiraz while Alex took a bus directly back to Ahwaz. An ancient city, Shiraz is a place of gardens, and the tombs of Hafez and Saedi, poets of renown in Persian literature. I went north a few miles to Persepolis, the ancient ruin that had been the capital of the Persian Empire until Alexander the Great conquered the country and burned it.
Pillars and gates - only the stone work is left as
Percepolis was destroyed by a great fire. Wall carving showing men approaching the
king.
While in Shiraz I heard the news that Lyndon Johnson would not run for President and that he would attempt peace talks with the North Vietnamese. In Shiraz I celebrated with the other Americans living there. We hardly guessed then that the war would drag on for nearly six more years.
The dome of one a Mosque in Shiraz The tomb of the poet Sadi
I took a night bus back to Teheran, and then on to Tabriz and Ahar. At the end of the two weeks, I returned to the hammum and the big tub where I washed the dust off of me and out of my clothes. I had seventy-five days left in Iran.