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Persepolis and other ruined cities

Persepolis and other ruined cities

I’ve left Tehran behind for three days to visit Shiraz. I arrived two nights ago, and will leave for Tehran and Paris tomorrow night (my flight schedule is the most ‘interesting’ I’ve had for a long time; I have to wait from around midnight — when I arrive from Shiraz — to 06:45, for my flight departure for Paris. I’m not sure yet how I will occupy myself at Khomeini airport in the middle of the night).

My main motivation in coming to Shiraz was to visit Persepolis, as well as the other archaeological sites. For the last two days I hired a car and driver and we covered several hundred kilometers across the desert visiting ancient ruins. Some of these sites were indeed extremely ancient, almost three thousand years old.

But how to describe Persepolis itself? I will try. The scale of the site is overwhelming; I spent almost three hours there and took over one hundred photographs. It is easily comparable in extent to the Foro Romano, the ruins of ancient Rome at the center of the Italian capital — but it is several hundred years older.

The entire city is built on a terraced plateau, which one reaches by climbing a monumental staircase. The steps are shallow, we are told, so that visiting dignitaries could mount them gracefully in their flowing robes. At the top, one passes between two enormous slabs which have been sculpted with beautiful bas-reliefs. Incongruously, at eye level, the stones have been covered with a range of graffitis from late 19th century and early 20th century explorers. I noticed at least one “count” something or other, a Gentleman Explorer for sure, and I tried to imagine what his trip to Persepolis must have been like and what the city would have looked like with many important monuments still hidden under sand.

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On the terrace there are many ruined palaces to visit, as well as the famous Apadana staircase, one half of which whose bas-reliefs are much better preserved than the other because they passed the centuries under the sands. Serried ranks of princes and kings pay tribute, for eternity, to king of the Achaemenids.

One palace, known as ‘Hadish’ near the corner of the complex intrigued me. I had arrived very early, at around 08.30, and there was no-one else at this corner of the ancient city apart from a bored security guard. In this palace, all had been destroyed except the frames of a door and window. On the ground one could see the stone stumps of many columns. The window frame must have been at least a meter in thickness. I looked out across an expanse of semi-arid desert, a small stand of trees in the near distance. The sun shone from a faultless blue sky as it probably had done 2,500 years ago. It was here in this palace, some say, that the fire was started by Persepolis’ conquerors — Alexander the great — which destroyed the city. The fire was fueled by the wooden columns supporting the roof, either accidentally in a drunken party (this is before the Islamic Republic, remember) or deliberately in retaliation for the destruction of Athens by Xerxes.

Three hours had passed, and I returned to the car and took tea with Ari, my driver, on the ground near our car under the shade of some trees. Throughout the morning I had had a constant, throbbing headache which I realised was the symptoms of caffein withdrawal — I had dared to leave my coffee maker in my bag at the left luggage at Mehrabad airport. I was extremely grateful for the tea. (Incredibly, it’s now three days since I have had coffee; thankfully, the headaches passed after the first day). Ari had worked for years in hospitals in Shiraz and very scrupulous when it came to hygine, carefully labeling our respective tea mugs. He had also studied a great deal of history, and he tried to answer my many questions.

There was still more to see. After tea, we drove six kilometers to the necropolis, the burial grounds for Achaemenid kings. From the distance, I saw a long ridge of mountains and I thought to myself, after spending a morning looking at bas-reliefs: “those look like monuments.” As we cam closer I realised they were monuments; hewn into the side of the mountain were four enormous tombs, tens of meters high, cross-shaped, with bas-reliefs below. These were the resting places of Darius II, Artaxerxes, Darius I and Xerxes I whose bones were placed in these chambers after the vultures had picked them clean. One bas relief was blank; asking Ari he told me that in fact this bas relief had been planned to commemorate a victory never happened.

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Our last destination was Pasagarde, where the tomb of Cyrus the Great stands in a desolate windswept plain. Centuries ago it was surrounded by a walled garden, but everything was destroyed by Alexander’s invading armies. A few hundred meters away are the ruins of his palace; incredibly one column is still standing and written on it, near the top, in cuneform script, are the words “I am Cyrus, the Achaemenid king”.

Although this inscription is not particularly hubristic, leaving Pasargade and reflecting on what I had seen throughout the day I was more than a little reminded of Shelly and the ruined statute of his king Ozymandias, staring out across the desert on his vanished empire, where, today, “nothing beside remains.”

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Visiting Khomeini's Tomb (Oct. 17th)

Visiting Khomeini's Tomb (Oct. 17th)

Today is a Friday, which means that it’s a holiday in Iran; Thursday and Friday are the equivalent of Saturday and Sunday back in Europe. It’s strange how the different religions around the world have chosen different days of the week for their holidays: Muslims on Friday, Jews on Saturday and Christians on Sunday.

In any case, I had decided that today I wouldn’t go to the IPM and I would let the students get on with their projects. They had a fair idea, I hoped, of how to continue with their projects without me. So with my colleague Marc (also here to teach at the school) we took the Tehran metro south to the very last station, the Tomb of Imam Khomeini.

It took almost an hour to ge there. Our train passed above ground, and we travelled through kilometers of long low buildings which spread out from Tehran and into the cities around it. Leaving the metro station, a dry desert heat rolled over us, and with each breath I could sense the moisture evaporating from my throat, not something I could not remember experiencing since I had been in the deserts of New Mexico. It was the end of October: I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to come here at the height of summer.

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In front of us, under the burning desert sun, stretched a large open square; beyond, were the unfinished dome and minarets of the mausoleum where Khomeini’s tomb lay. Around us, in the distance, we could see a few trees, a road or two, but nothing more: we were really on the edge of the desert. Families, men, children, black-clad women, passed by us returning from the shrine, and under the nearby trees we could see many tents, some with families. The immense open spaces around the made the place feel strangely empty, even though there was a fair amount of people. I realised that for the first time in ten days, thanks to the twenty kilometers separating us from Tehran, I could no long hear the sound of traffic, and I felt oddly relaxed and calm.

We walked a few hundred meters under the arcaded passageways until we reached the entrance to the shrine, taking off our shoes as we went in. Inside, I was surprised how confined it seemed; the walls were covered by blue plastic sheeting and the ceiling reminded me oddly of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, full of exposed pipes and wires. Six green concrete columns surrounded the shrine. To the right and the left were other large unpainted concrete columns. The floors were covered with carpets where many people were praying. In the middle was the shrine itself; a glass box with a white metal grid and a green carpeted roof. The faithful pressed their hands against the metal and muttered a few prayers. To one side, a separate side of the box was reserved for women. I realised that, completely hidden from view, behind the blue plastic sheeting and directly overhead was the unfinished skeleton structure of the shrine’s central dome.

We spent around fifteen or twenty minutes sitting on the carpets before the shrine. “Before the man who had made the west tremble” as my friend remarked. In the shrine, the atmosphere was strangely flat; it was not crowded, and I heard no wailing passionate professions of faith. We left, put our shoes back on and stepped back into the desert sun.

Once outside again, we visited vast the inner courtyards of the shrine which were completely deserted apart from a few workmen. There were certainly no tourists other than us! To the north, listening carefully, we could hear traffic on the motorway rushing towards the airport. Above, a crane made a fifth minaret next to the skeleton of the shrine’s unfinished dome. We had seen all that there was to see, and we returned towards the metro.

Today at the University, when I told the students where we had been, no-one could understand why we had gone there. “You went where“? they all asked us with an air of incredulity. Most of them had only been there on school trips, if they had been at all. Well, you know, I replied, Khomeini was such a important and influential figure in the politics of the 20th century. I was surprised to have tell this to an Iranian! Someone who casts a long shadow over Iran and someone who shaped in a very profound way Iran’s relationship with the west. For us, from the West, Khomeini was for decades someone indelibly associated with Iran. “And do you have tombs like that in the west?” one of them asked me. Well, the only thing I could think of was the tomb of Napoleon at Les Invalides; an enormous marble coffin seemingly half the size of the golden dome of les Invalides. Hubristic. “But that was two hundred years ago”, was the indignant response. And I must agree that “Les Invalides” is nothing beside this enormous structure on the edge of the desert.

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Arriving in Tehran – in the taxi!

Arriving in Tehran – in the taxi!

The cavernous Imam Khomeini airport seemed almost deserted. I disembarked from the plane, retrieved my bag and passed through customs control without incident. But I had a lingering doubt in my mind — would there be someone to meet me at the airport? I had been told by the astronomer who had invited me that there would, but the secretary who booked my flight never mentioned this to me. There would be someone there, right? I had no map; “Google maps” for Tehran shows the intricate, sprawling mess of Tehrani streets as a single crossroads. No data.

In the end I need not have worried. As soon I left the baggage area I was met by a smiling pot-bellied man holding up a big card with ‘Dr. McCracken’ written on it in 40-point type. This was my driver to the institute. Hello welcome! Where are you from? Well, I am from Ireland, but I live in Paris. Ireland! I worked in England for two months, in London, with my brother. (We were walking down the echoing empty halls of IKA. We took the lift. My driver talking into his mobile phone. He passes me his mobile phone.) Here is my brother, Amir, he says, I speak to the voice on the telephone: Hello! How are you? Are you in London? No, I am in Tehran. We can meet! My brother will give you my number, he says. Nice to speak to you, I reply. Thank you! I hand back the mobile phone. These people like to speak — and to speak to foreigners!

In the taxi, we rolled through a maze of empty roads and autoroutes in the middle of what as far as I could tell was open desert. Through the window, I saw a lone planet and the moon’s pale disk low on the horizon following our taxi faithfully towards the city. It was around ten o’clock in the evening.

By ten thirty, soon after I had seen the first few buildings of Tehran, we had stopped: gridlock. Our taxi idled in heavy fumes of very incompletely combusted petroleum products, and I reluctantly rolled up my window, because the night air was pleasantly warm. I was beginning to get an inkling of Tehrani traffic. Beyond the cars I could see a maze of buildings most of which seemed to have been built in the last fifty years or so, but even so there was still that wonderful feeling of strangeness that always comes after an aeroplane flight to a country you have never been to before. In only five hours, everything changes.

After another half an hour or so, a gleaming, glittering tower appeared on the horizon. From a disk near the gracefully tapering peak needles of light shone and flickered. Was this the Iranian Tour Eiffel? My taxi driver became more and more exited. Very nice, very nice, beautiful, he muttered to himself repeatedly under his breath, all the while craning his neck to see the tower, like an excited child approaching the north pole just before Christmas. There is a very big party there tonight, he told me. Tonight is opening night. Then I realised we were actually driving right towards the tower. We passed the security barrier, drove to the foot of this immense luminous tower. Here is my brother! my driver exclaimed. I shook hands with small man in a dark suit. Hello! I said, Nice to meet you. I won’t take up your time, he told me. Welcome. If you need to contact me, here is my card. Have you eaten? He will take you to a restaurant. I thanked him, but I wanted to see my bed before my dinner. And we left the tower, and in an another half an hour I had arrived at the IPM.

Arriving in Tehran – In the aeroplane

Arriving in Tehran – In the aeroplane

I’m now a good five thousand kilometers to the east of Paris, in the Iranian capital city, Tehran. Tehran! I am here to teach at a school in observational astronomy. The Iranians have ambitions to build a three-metre class telescope, but almost no-one here has any experience with real data; most astronomy in either the hard-maths variety of theoretical cosmology or observations of nearby stars using detectors at least a generation out of date. So a change of culture is needed, really; modern observational astronomy with modern detectors and modern data reduction software. And no matter there is no telescopes just yet: there are gigabytes of data freely available over the internet — the only problem is downloading it. Despite the fact that the IPM (Insitute for Physics and Mathematics, where the school is being held) has amongst the fastest network connection in the country, we struggle get above a few hundred kb/second. But then I am used to my office in Paris not far from the centre of Renater, the French networking agency, so I am a bit spoiled. I will be spending almost two weeks in Tehran before flying to Shiraz for a few days.

So that is why I am here, but I didn’t talk about how I got here — at the very comfortable IPM guest house, from where I am writing these words. Well — by aeroplane of course. Iran Air run a direct flight from Paris Orly to Tehran twice a week. I thought for about two seconds about Nicolas Bouvier and his trip to Tehran from Geneva in his Fiat Tupelino — but i wanted to arrive this year at least, and I had sadly sold my opel ascona many years ago.

The aircraft cabin seemed modern at first: the plane’s age was revealed by an ancient in-flight entertainment system. I was reassured by the presence of it seemed at least half a dozen airline pilots in the seats in front of me. I felt strangely relieved that there was no useless in-flight magazine that I would waste my time idly flipping through. I watched attentively (at first) the in-flight film, in Farsi with English subtitles, but as the flight wore on it became harder and harder to follow. (After the extremely tedious ‘man from London’ by Bela Tarr which I subjected Marie-Laure to last weekend I felt I could sit through anything). It seemed to be the story of a young girl, a psychology student, who works with old people and who becomes intrigued by the painting of a veiled woman who may or may not be connected with one of her patients. The film shows many broad tree-lined boulevards, elegant buildings and also features a lot of driving (something normal in Tehran — as I am sure I will describe in the next few days). Noticing the odd colour cast of the film (surely a feature of the in-flight entertainment system), the cars that most people seemed to be driving and all the chunky cream-coloured plastic telephones everyone used, I was convinced that the ‘action’ of the film took place sometime in the 1970s — until an e-mail address was exchanged, and I realized that we were really some time in the last decade or so. But — as I said — my attention wandered. This I realised was partly because of the English translations (and partly because of the extremely wooden acting), which seemed to be almost transliterations more than translations. Given the very different word order in Farsi, almost everyone spoke like they were reciting lines of poems, with the subject buried at the end of each sentence. But very soon after we arrived in Tehran, at the Imam Khomeini Airport.