Descendants of Cyrus by Thornton Christopher;

Author:Thornton, Christopher;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS026020 History / Middle East / Iran, TRV015000 Travel / Middle East / General
Publisher: Potomac Books

7

Kashan

Court of the Qajars

We need food to maintain life, but exceeding what we need destroys us.

Rose-water pastry when you’re not hungry will torture your belly,

but the driest bread after fasting tastes like rose-water pastry.

—Saadi, Gulistan

It felt like a game of peek-a-boo. I was about to take a picture of the entrance of the Borujerdiha, a restored nineteenth-century house tucked into one of the backstreets of Kashan, when a young woman stuck her head out of a doorway halfway down the street. She saw that she had caught my eye, and instantly she knew what I knew—that I had become an object of curiosity, and this so spooked her that she quickly retreated to the protection of the doorway. I turned away, pretended to take a photo, and another, and then she was back again. I faked another photo, lazily turned to look down the street, and aimed my camera in her direction—but not discreetly enough. Again she disappeared. I turned back to the Borujerdiha, faked a few more photos, and again she appeared, but this time with another woman about the same age. Her sister? A cousin? Friend? It didn’t matter. They were all smiles and giggles, struggling to straighten their slipping headscarves as they giggled and ogled from halfway down the street.

After a couple of months in Iran I was used to being the object of attention in regional cities and highway stops all over the country, but I had never experienced anything like this. It was all the more unusual because of Kashan’s reputation as a bastion of social, religious, and, of course, political conservatism. Kashan was not Qom or the southern, working-class neighborhoods of Tehran, where the sight of women donning full chadors is not unusual, but nor do the women of Kashan seek out the most form-fitting manteaux and purposely allow their scarves to slip off the backs of their heads, like the “liberal elites” of North Tehran.

The game of peek-a-boo continued. The women emerged from the doorway, each time more boldly, smiles and giggles bubbling from their faces, but after a while it was clear that they had had their fun or were too bashful to take it a step further. And so they disappeared. It was disappointing, but I was also relieved. It was fascinating to imagine how long this could go on and what it might lead to—an invitation for coffee? But the street was blazing hot and the interior of the Borujerdiha awaited.

This was my introduction to Kashan, where an air of modest traditionalism is de rigueur. It might be argued that Kashan’s strain of traditionalism is linked to its reputation as a center for the production of high-quality arts and crafts. From 1796 to 1925, which marks the reign of the Qajar dynasty, high-quality pottery and enamelwork, textiles and carpets, metal products and other handicrafts were churned out of workshops that filled backstreets like the one I was standing in. This brought enormous wealth to the city’s merchants, who rewarded themselves by constructing grand, spacious homes like the Borujerdiha.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.