Stephen Orth: Couchsurfing in Iran: Revealing a Hidden World

Her mother rolls out a plastic sheet, also with a floral design, on the living room carpet and places on it bowls with small meatballs and potatoes together with pita bread and dugh, a sour milk drink similar to Turkish ayran.

“Do you remember this? At last year’s New Year celebration you spilled it all over your T-shirt,” says Yasmin grinning.

• Sit cross-legged on the floor.

• Wait for the starting orders: “ Bokhor, bokhor !”

• Tear off a rectangular piece of the pita bread.

• Fill it with the main course and roll it up.

• Bite into it.

• Try to surreptitiously pick up bits of food that have landed on the carpet (they never land on the plastic sheet).

THE TV ISon nonstop, and now there is a report about a bus of battleground pilgrims driving over a mine and exploding in the area that Yasmin’s father is now visiting. She is worried about him because he hasn’t been in touch since this morning and isn’t taking calls.

“How can a bus drive over a twenty-five-year-old mine? Haven’t the roads been cleared of the things for years?” I inquire.

“The bus hit a car and veered off the road, triggering a land mine from the war. Incredibly unlucky.”

Yasmin’s mother is understandably not enthusiastic about our plan. She tries for the umpteenth time to reach her husband without success. “It’s pretty out of the way. Reception is sure to be bad,” she says.

Yasmin changes the topic.

“Do you want to join me on Sunday for a very special meeting? Something absolutely forbidden?”

“Sure, what’s it all about?”

“A special kind of relationship.”

“How special?”

“ Very special.”

“A more precise description would be helpful.”

“Have you heard about BDSM? Bondage games? Sadomasochism? It’s hard to imagine anything more forbidden in Iran. We meet in a park. Slaves, masters, and a dominatrix.”

“ Aha .”

“I knew that you wouldn’t say no!”

BUT FIRST OFall some history lessons are on the program. The next day we visit the National Museum of Iran, which is considered by those in the know to be the mother of all museums, at least that is what is written on a poster on the outer wall. The exhibits are in fact sensational. Who knew that the Persians turned out the first cartoon in the world, with emphasis on turned? It is on a round earthen goblet depicting an ibex jumping toward a tree and eating its leaves. The picture consists of five individual images, and if you turn the goblet quickly enough it gives the impression of animation, somewhat similar to a flip-book.

At the Academy Awards in 2300 BC Ibex Eats Leaves would have racked up the Oscars in all categories: screenplay, director, visual effects, score (the sound of clay rubbing on a sandy surface), and best supporting role (the tree). Unfortunately, there were no Oscars then. Cultural events in Germany at that time? A couple long-haired cave dwellers spinning old hunter yarns at the fireside. Cultural events in America at that time? Well, you get the picture. A feast for cineasts is also the sculptured throne scene from the Achaemenid era depicting King Darius and his son Xerxes. Both have sensational beards and are holding lotus blossoms. Light-headed from the fumes of two incense burners, they receive representatives from a distant province. When the stone relief was chiseled out at around 500 BC, Persia was the first superpower in history, with an empire ranging from India to the Danube. Today’s countries of Turkey, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Pakistan, and Afghanistan all belonged to Darius’s gigantic empire. A network of roads was created stretching thousands of miles, with countless caravanserai for travelers. And the first postal system in history.

However, in the subsequent centuries, you had to be careful when deciding on domestic or international rates. Time and again the borders shifted due to various wars, various battles, and various conquerors. First, there was Alexander the Great. Then the Parthians, and the Sasanians, followed by the Arabs, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, the Safawids. Good shahs and bad shahs, and finally, in the twentieth century, the shahs of the Pahlavi dynasty, eventually leading to the revolution with ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei. Already in 1979, when the mullahs came to power, Persia, on the way from global empire to religious dictatorship, had suffered more at the hands of unscrupulous tyrants than most other nations.

The next history lesson of the day wouldn’t have happened if I had been traveling alone. I simply would have missed the finer details on the Bagh-e Melli Gate. The magnificent entrance to a former military parade ground was built during the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1922, with huge doors with floral designs made from cast iron. Hand-painted ornate tiles depict idyllic landscapes and deadly weapons. Meadows, forests, lakes, and country houses with red roofs provide the background for depictions of Vickers machine guns between Iranian flags.

“Do you notice anything?” asks Yasmin.

“It would look quite nice without the weapons.”

“I don’t mean that; look at the flags.”

“The crescent moon in the middle of the white stripe is missing. And there are truncated golden animal legs on the lower red stripe.”

“Exactly! The lion was painted over—it was the national emblem of Iran during the time of the two Pahlavi shahs.”

“And there was no money left for red paint, which is why the legs remain?”

“Probably. Do you see the metal crest above the door?”

“Looks as if half of it was sawed off.”

“There was also a lion there, and below it the inscription Long Live the Shah. Ayatollah Khomeini had a metal plate superimposed, so that all that remains is Long Live .

“Is censorship always so easy to spot?”

“Would that it were. But luckily, not everyone is as blind as you,” she says.

At the last stop in today’s history triathlon, the Golestan Palace and its parks, the lions have survived. There are so many of them that they would have needed more than just a bit of white paint. Most of the lions seem to be busy pouncing on ibexes or dragons. Such motifs symbolize the victory of Persia against her adversaries and were much loved by the shahs who lived here from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.

Yasmin then tells me of the most foolish shah of all—Naser al-Din Shah Qajar, in the second half of the nineteenth century. He believed, for example, that red was his color, and nobody else was allowed to wear anything red. “On top of that, he was a passionate collector who was always swapping whole Persian cities for works of art.” Fourteen cabinets of finest porcelain from Russia, England, and Germany are displayed in a room of the palace. “Each cabinet was a city,” explains Yasmin. She always has a story on hand that you can’t find in history books. “Once he was so drunk that he even wanted to swap Tehran, until, at the very last moment, one of his advisers pointed out that it was the capital of the country.”