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Postscript: In Imam Khomeni airport in the middle of the night…

Postscript: In Imam Khomeni airport in the middle of the night…

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I’ve now returned to Paris (since around one week now; I had to leave once again last weekend for a short trip to Italy). My flight to Paris left Imam Khomenei airport at the incredible time of 6.45AM. I arrived on my connecting flight from Shiraz at around midnight.

Iranian domestic flights are almost completely filled with business travellers; our aeroplane between Shiraz and Tehran was a narrow-bodied Fokker aircraft (I don’t think I have ever flew in one of those before) and within an hour we had touched down at the Mehrabad airport, Tehran. I left the terminal building, picked up my bag which I’d left there one week previously, and looked for a taxi driver to take me to Khomeni airport. I prudently (or so I thought) went to the main taxi stand outside the airport where I was in some mysterious fashion allocated a driver. The other drivers pointed at me and pointed at my driver, a young man who spoke loudly with all the other drivers. He led me to his car which was unmarked — nothing too unusual in Iran — but I did notice that he had small model car stuck to the dashboard. A racing car?

It was now after midnight, and Tehran traffic had calmed a little although there was still a lot of cars on the road. Within minutes of leaving the airport I knew what kind of taxi ride I was in for — a very hair-raising one, even by Tehran standards. My driver overtook every single car in our path. I thought of Marc’s taxi driver who tried to reassure him by exclaiming “I am champion of Tehran rally!” I think I was frightened for the first time in a taxi in Tehran. I saw we were doing perhaps 120, 140km/hr, and in Tehran’s narrow crowded roads, that is a lot. At one point I saw my driver produce a very thick wad of Rials from a shirt pocket, grip the steering wheel with his legs, and start to count the bills, one by one. I touched his shoulder and suggested that he perhaps continue his calculations at a later time.

Within twenty (very long) minutes we had arrived on the edge of the desert, at Khomenei airport. I didn’t know quite what to expect, but IKA (as it is known by the international three word abbreviations) was bursting to the seams. It was around one in the morning and my flight did not depart for another six hours. I expected the airport to be empty. Instead, it was full. After walking around the crowded concourses for half an hour I could find no place where I could sit down in peace and quiet and (perhaps) work away on my laptop

In time-honoured travelling astronomer fashion I scanned the skirting boards for power sockets but without success. In the end I found one, at the other end of the terminal, underneath the stairs near to a very small cafe. In the entire aiport there was exactly one publically accessible power socket! Okay! Perhaps I can work here and write away on my laptop. I ordered a tea (no coffee in Iran, remember) and sat down down, thinking of the long hours ahead of me. But my chair was too far forward! I reached to move the seat, sat down –and when I next saw my hand I was amazed to see a large amount of blood welling from my finger. I had managed to chop off half of my fingernail as my seat cover was not actually affixed to my seat. Ouch! I showed my bleeding finger accusingly to the cafe-owner, who became immediately apologetic; a friend of his arrived and I packed up my computer with one hand and was taken to the first-aid station at the airport, at the other end of the concourse. Through the teeming crowds.

At IKA first aid a man with a very large pair of scissors cut off my hanging fingernail, bandaged my hand, sent me back to the bar, where they offered me drinks. And hour had passed! But it was still only 2AM in the morning, and now with my bandaged hand I certainly couldn’t type any more. It was still not time to check in. I went to change what little Rials I had left and was amazed to see Iranians in the other money-changing queue (reserved for Iranians) with enormous bundles of money — this I guessed were savings of many years which were being converted into dollars.

Now it was time to check in. I noticed idly that a check-in desk not too far to where I was standing offered me the possibility of a flight to Kabul. From the other side of the concourse, where the arrivals area was, I could hear the sound of a marching band, and I went to investigate. A large crowd has assembled in the baggage area, complete with red carpet and banners. Patriotic music was being played, which seemed slightly sinister to me. What was going on here? It was, somewhere explained to me, the returning Iranian volleyball team. A lot of people had come to IKA in the middle of the night to see them.

After check-in perhaps the longest ritual of the entire night: between 3AM and 4AM I stood in the line-up for passport control. There seemed to be one official carefully examining every single passport of every single person who was not Iranian and who wished to leave Iran; it was interminably slow. On the other side of the check-in counter I had noticed a large group of people in curious attire: all the men and women were dressed in brightly-coloured muslin dresses. I saw they we all traveling to Mumbai; the small dark lady of perhaps fifty years of age in front in the glacially slow-moving passport queue was part of this group and we started to talk.

“We are Zoroastrians” she explained to me. “We are here on a pilgrimage to Yadz.” She spoke perfect English with a faint British accent. She turned out to be one of the most intelligent and charming people I’ve ever met. She lived in Pune, which I knew from my travels to IUCAA. “So what does one do if one is a Zoroastrian?” I asked her. Zorastrianism, I remembered now, was the official religion of the Achaemenids. Unfortunately, all the Zoroastrian texts were destroyed when Persepolis was burned. She explained excitedly, “There are so many prayers, so many prayers!” A lot of complicated rituals. The dress that you wear, the dresses that I saw people wearing in the dress that is yours for life. The pockets of this dress have ritual and mystical significance. The pocket at the back represents the weight you carry for your entire life. But her flight was close to departing, so I gave up my place in the passport line to her; she disappeared into the crowds heading for the flight for Mumbai.

AFter passport control, the rest of my flight was uneventful; there were no vast crowds of people here. I certainly got the impression that IKA only half (perhaps less) of the people there were actually taking an aeroplane.

I arrived in Paris early in the morning. I took the bus from the airport and walked the streets to my apartment. It was cold and damp and my clothes were not warm enough. The capital seemed deserted, empty: after Tehran, Paris seemed like a small country town. The traffic was calm and unhurried and there seemed to be no-one in the streets. I saw for the first time in two weeks women walking the pavements with their hair uncovered. I looked for the first time at the perfume advertisements which are everywhere in Paris and saw bare shoulders and long legs. How was this possible? I felt a little perturbed; even though winter was approaching I felt a little hint of spring in the sensation that here people could wear what ever they wanted to wear without risk of official censure. I saw Paris differently now. I was happy to return home.

Persepolis and other ruined cities

Persepolis and other ruined cities

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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)

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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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In Tehran (Oct. 14th)

In Tehran (Oct. 14th)

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My first full day in Tehran I spent at the offices of the Iranian National Observatory … Project. Project, because the observatory does not exist yet. The building itself has just been constructed, and people have moved there only a few weeks ago; arriving at the front door I was greeting by a paint-stained astronomer, and I almost half expected to be asked to help out with the building work. The building is even further north than the guest house, in a hilly wooded area at the end of a long dirt track. The building grounds were taken from the Shah after the revolution, like so much of the land now belonging to the IPM (The institute for physics and mathematics).

But … Tehran? Although the area around the guest house is filled with expensive and modern apartment blocks, the dramatic backdrop of dry desert mountains and the black-clad women crossing the street made it clear to me, leaving the IPM that morning, that this was not a European city. I admit that I was perhaps just a little apprehensive when I was first invited to a workshop in Iran, almost three years ago; that trip never happened because of Ahmadinejad’s election and a subsequent mass resignation of University staff. With the exception of the traffic, however, Iran seemed to me one of the most unthreatening places I have ever visited. But what did people really think?

We had lunch at large table in the INO gardens. I ate a delicious kebab with rice (which I would soon become very familiar with) and a very interesting yoghurt drink. We admired the large blackboard extending all along the outside wall of the building, perfect for those long difficult equations but perhaps less useful for an observational astronomer. Perhaps a clear giveaway that the institute’s director is a theoretical cosmologist.

Everyone was talking about Ahmadinejad’s television appearance the previous evening. In fact, his face was the first I saw on an Iranian television set: arriving late at night at the IPM guest house I found the guards at the gate house intently watching the presidential broadcast. At the lunch table, although I don’t speak Farsi, it was clear from the tone of the conversation that Ahmadinejad’s pronouncements were not taken very seriously. They also told me that there was a certain apprehension each time one of these television appearance was scheduled — who knows what ridiculous pronouncement would be made which would damage even further Iran’s standing in the outside world?

I thought of Viktor Strum, nuclear physicist living in totalitarian Russia in Vassily Grossman’s epic ‘Life and Fate’ which I had just finished reading, and I even went so far to tell a little of his story to those at the dinner table. Thankfully however the parallels with that epoch and today in Iran are slender. “We can say anything we want here” affirmed one of the physicists at the dinner table, “it’s just not so certain anyone will pay any attention to us.”

Lunch was over, and returned to my computer to continue preparing the course which I would have to give in a few days.