Tehran is an easy contender for the title of most misrepresented city in the world.
Partly as a result of decades long US sanctions, media sensationalism and the occasional name confusion with a war-ravaged neighbouring Arab country, the world’s image of Iran is sadly twisted, misinformed and plain wrong. Iran or, from the 1979 revolution onwards, the Islamic Republic of Iran is not what people imagine it to be.
Visitors to Iran’s huge and sprawling capital Tehran will be quickly amazed to discover a clean, beautiful and varied city that is friendly, modern and surprisingly very safe.
Despite Iran’s famous Islamic rules on dress codes, you will find on any given street or home in Tehran, a city of 15 million people, less chadors and more fashionable and looser headscarves than in Kuala Lumpur, less or no niqab and burka compared to London and even arguably less beards than in Berlin.
Set against the timeline of Iran’s 3,000 year long and mainly glorious history, Tehran is a relatively young capital city. In 1776 Agha Mohammad Khan, a king of the Qajar Dynasty chose it as his seat of power due to Tehran’s pivotal location near to the historic Persian homelands on the Iranian Plateau and close to the new Persian dominions in the Central Asian steppes and the Mountains of the Caucasus.
Although Tehran is not far from the desert and has an arid climate don’t expect to find an oasis town of date palms and plodding camels. Instead it is a city of well-lit parks with statues of famous poets and broad pedestrian friendly boulevards lined with tall trees that turn lime green in spring, emerald when the days are warm, golden yellow in fall and leafless when the city is blanketed with winter snow.
Tehran is modern and appears for the most parts brown and frozen in time circa 1970s. However, amidst its mainly boxy low-rise buildings there are some fine surviving examples of fin de siecle French architecture and old houses of astonishing grace and beauty.
Tehran is a city that belongs nominally and geographically but not mentally in the Middle East. Despite deriving its religion, writing script and 40% of its vocabulary from the Arabs, Iranians are an Indo-European race whose language suffused with the poetries of Ferdowsi, Hafez, Omar Khayyam and Rumi is believed by many to be the most beautiful-sounding and elegant in the world.
Text and photographs copyright Kerk Boon Leng October 2016
Kerk Boon Leng Photographs & Notes 