Kashan is, supposedly, from where the Three Wise Men left to follow the star to Bethlehem, for those of you interested in both Bible stories and trivia. Why anyone would leave Kashan is beyond me – it is an historic oasis town, not far from the famous Bagh-e Fin (Fin Gardens) built for Shah Abbas I, and has a wonderful bazaar and some truly lovely historic buildings that have been carefully conserved.
I caught the bus to Kashan from Tehran. The bus passed through some harsh, dry but beautiful desert landscape leading up to mountains to the west, some of which still had snow of them. A woman sat beside me, of course – men don’t generally sit beside women unless they are connected to them in some way. She was studying accountancy and was on her way back to Kashan to see family.She didn’t say anything to me until we were nearly at Kashan, and after the requisite exchange of information, said she would explain to the driver when she got off that I may need some help (I didn’t but she was concerned). As it was, it was fine as a taxi driver with a smattering of English soon appeared (as they do). Thankfully due to the rial dropping in value, taxis were ridiculously cheap so that even I couldn’t resist using them. He rang the place I wanted to stay at, Khan-e Ehshan, en route – passing me the phone so I could speak to them, which lead to some confusion as I hadn’t realised that is what he’d done – to check they had space for me. It was a traditional house that is now a small hotel. Well, it was lovely – the rooms round a courtyard with a square blue pond in the middle which must look beautiful with its greenery and flowers in the summer. My room was off an upstairs balcony, en suite, included breakfast and costing the vast sum of about 12 euro. I was sorry I only had time to spend one night there.
Kashan has preserved some of its old nineteenth-century houses along with a bath house and some bits of the city wall that once surrounded the town. There is also the bazaar that I wandered through that evening, selling all sorts of things: rolls of fabric, huge bowls of dried fruit or nuts, jewellery, clothes, shoes, toys, right down to a shop with red heart-shaped cushions hanging from the ceiling, along with some huge blow-up red lips – completely incongruous it seemed in an ancient Iranian bazaar full of women mostly in black chadors (women dress more conservatively outside of Tehran it seems).
But the old houses were the reason I had come to Kashan, as recommended by an Iranian archaeological colleague of mine inLondon. As with traditional architecture in the Muslim world, the outsides are often completely non-descript and unremarkable. Having stopped to admire a section of the city wall, I ventured into a network of streets and down an alleyway, through a doorway, paid my entrance fee and went down another corridor and out into a courtyard to wander around a labyrinthine and beautiful house, Khan-e Tabatabei – full of the most lovely wall paintings of birds or scenery in blue, or with ceilings decorated with mirrors or lit by red and blue stained glass windows all set off by white walls. Because these houses had been rescued from ruin, there is little by way of furniture or fittings but still their grandeur is evident, and with their seclusion from the outside world, remarkably peaceful places. After that I paid a visit to the Hammam-e Sultan Mir Ahmad. The caretaker waved me out onto the roof first – the person at the previous house had told him I was coming and to let me out there! The baths below were lit by skylights in the domed roofs, so the roof had a lunar feel to it, and great views in all directions of the town and towards the mountains. The baths themselves, now no longer used for that purpose, were fabulous, so much so that I took an involuntary breath in as I rounded the corner from the entrance into the first main room – once again beautiful wall paintings, patterns and tiles, this time rescued from beneath layers and layers of accumulated grime and plaster.
At the previous house, the man who sold me my ticket asked if I wanted a guided tour the following day to take me to some sites and a small village up in the mountain. I wasn’t so sure, not being a great one for guided tours, but then realised as he showed me his leaflets that I might be able to combine that with going onto Esfahan. Once again it really wasn’t expensive (helped by the fact that I was also travelling out of season), and he did come recommended in the Lonely Planet. I said I’d get back to him but the more I thought about it, the better it seemed, especially as it would mean driving past the infamous Natanz nuclear facility, which I couldn’t resist. So I returned to the house I’d visited first to find him. Having finalised the details, he asked if I would mind meeting a fifteen year old girl, the daughter of a friend, who was learning English and wanted to speak to a ‘real’ English speaking person. Of course not, so I suggested she come over to my hotel sometime after 7pm.
Forgetting temporarily that this was Iran, I expected just her to appear, but of course she arrived with both her parents and the guide and we all went off to a teahouse. Mother, who was about my age, and daughter were the image of each other even to fiddling with their chadors in the same way (mind you, chadors, as with headscarves I’d learnt, lend themselves to being fiddled with – it’s the constant need to keep them in place for one thing), and father seemed old enough to be her grandfather. In fact I thought he was until he said something about her mother being a good wife. They were all lovely – we had tea (tea in Iran is delicious, not too strong and comes without milk, often dispensed from a Russian samovar) and some small cakes sitting on what is called a ‘day bed’, I think – a large flat, hard sofa-like structure covered in carpets – while the water tinkled in the pond in the middle of the courtyard. Fatma, the daughter, and I struggled to find things to talk about. Having never actually had to engage in a conversation in English beyond her classroom, we had to stick to fairly basic things which soon ran out. Naturally, though she wanted to know whether I was married or not, and if I was religious. Unwilling to lie but at risk of shocking her, though also realising that it was important she understand that things are done differently in different countries and that they are neither better nor worse, I gently explained no to both questions. She didn’t seem too perturbed, nor thankfully were her parents, but she clearly worried for me as she advised me to find both when we parted!
The next day the guide arrived with a friend of his who was to do the driving, and off we set for Esfahan via an archaeological site, a nuclear facility and a mountain village…