From Esfahan I travelled south to Yazd. Yazd is one of the oldest towns in existence in the world. Settled into the desert, it is built almost entirely of mudbrick. Its old core is a warren of narrow streets, covered alleys and high walls with only the old wooden doors suggesting there might be houses behind them. I had two missions in Yazd – the first to explore the town, including to visit the Zorastrian fire temple, and the second, to get a ticket to get me out of Iran and back to Ankara in time to catch my flight home in about 10 days’ time.
Yazd was, of course, hot – a balmy 25 degrees centigrade during the day (it gets to over forty in the summer); clearly this was considered cool as the heating was still on in the hotel I was staying in. The hotel was once an old traditional house, in the old town and with a small rectangular pool in the centre of its covered courtyard. I was allowed up onto the roof to look out over Yazd – its coffee-coloured roof-line punctuated by minarets and domes, as might be expected, but also by wind towers. Wind towers are ingenious – a natural form of air conditioning. They are designed to catch the passing wind and funnel it down into the rooms below. I had a vent in the ceiling of my hotel room from one such tower that delivered a waft of cool air every so often.
The other thing that Yazd is famous for is its qanat water system. I paid a visit to the Yazd Water Museum – also housed in a restored traditional house – which explained the history and the process. It involved locating a spring and then digging a well, or a tunnel from it to create a water supply but one that relied on gravity. These tunnels were hand dug by men who always dressed in white, so that they could be more easily seen in the unlit tunnels and, more starkly, because white is the colour of burial shrouds. If they were killed by a tunnel collapsing or well caving in, they were already dressed for their burial, giving some indication of how dangerous it was. Most old houses have access to this qanat water system in the basement, as was the case in my hotel, reached by a flight of stairs down into the darkness, in a room that allowed for water to be collected.
The other thing Yazd is famous for is for being the home of the Zoroastrian religion. It is here, in a discreet temple set back in a garden, that the ever burning flame central to Zoroastrianism is to be found. Zoroastrianism is, in tandem with Yazd itself, one of the world’s oldest extant religions, going back at least 3000 years or so. It was the religion of Persia until the arrival of Islam and Iran still has a community of practicing Zoroastrians; other communities are found in Asia amongst other places. In Yazd the women at least were recognisable as they wore clothes that seemed more Indian than Middle Eastern. The winged anthropomorphic figure, Faravahar, is to be found, as I was later to see for myself, in prominent position at Persepolis.
And of course there was the old town itself. I spent ages wandering about, being careful not to be run over by the occasional motorbike coming round a corner – about the largest vehicle that can fit in many of the narrow streets – and admiring the architecture. Many houses still have their traditional doors. These have two door knockers on them – a round one on one side, a long thin one on the other: the former for women to use, the latter for men. This is so that the women of the house know when it is a woman knocking so they can open the door. I ventured into the mosque, Masjed-e Jameh. More so than others I’d visited, it had a sense of serenity.
Mind you a mosque has been on the site for many hundreds of years, and prior to that, it was a Zoroastrian site. I was admiring the place when a woman in a black chador glided past, giving me glare. She carried on to go and pray, and seemed deeply involved in this when, to my amusement, her phone rang. Would she ignore it and carry on with her prayers? Not at all, she answered it straight away and was already chatting away as she scuttled out through a side arch.
My other, increasingly urgent, mission was to get a ticket. I had a flight booked back to London from Ankara and had been intending to take the train back from Tabriz but to date had failed to get a train ticket. At my hotel I asked for helpand they sent me in the direction of a travel agents, Ani Gasht. They were immensely helpful and I spent half the day sitting in their office being fed tea and cake while they sorted out what could be done for me. No train ticket, too close to Na Ruz, the major Iranian holiday; no bus ticket either (though I can’t say I was too sorry about that – it would have been a long journey), the only option was to fly but changing my existing ticket was going to be expensive, so in the end we worked out that I would have to book a separate flight from Tehran to Ankara, spend two nights there and then catch my London flight.
All the while, I was able to have the occasional conversation with a woman working there who spoke excellent English. All the usual questions, was I married, why not? What did I think of having to wear hejab, ‘it’s ugly, isn’t it?’ she followed with. She herself had just got married. I asked her if she’d done much travelling herself – only to Dubai – but now she was married she would be able to travel with her husband, but in fact they were thinking of emigrating to Australia where her brother already was. In the end, it was all sorted, and one flight on Iranian Air from Tehran at 5am on a Friday morning to Ankara was booked. Luckily it was comparatively cheap and I had enough cash to pay for it. Knowing there was no way I could access my bank account nor use a credit card thanks to the sanctions, I had been careful to bring enough for emergencies as well. Having paid for the plane ticket, I had just enough cash left for the rest of my trip, provided no emergencies actually happened. And so, I could go onto to Shiraz and to another of my main reasons for visiting Iran, the great archaeological site of Persepolis.
Read Caroline’s previous posts about her trip to Iran here:
Welcome to Iran: first stop Tehran