Iran Culture & Language

Persian culture has been continuous for two and a half thousand years and has absorbed conquest after conquest without losing its language, which is the fact everything else rests on.

Poetry as popular culture

Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, sixty thousand couplets of pre-Islamic legend written around 1000 AD, is credited with keeping Persian alive after the Arab conquest. Hafez, Saadi, Rumi and Omar Khayyam are quoted in daily speech, and the tombs of the first two in Shiraz are among the most visited places in the country — by Iranians.

The garden

The chahar bagh, a walled garden divided into four by water channels, is the ancestor of formal gardens from the Alhambra to the Taj Mahal, and the Old Persian word for a walled enclosure gave English the word paradise. Nine Persian gardens are UNESCO-listed together.

Carpets

Weaving is regional and specific — Tabriz, Kashan, Isfahan, Qom, Kerman and the tribal Qashqai and Bakhtiari rugs are all distinguishable by pattern, knot and palette. It is a serious industry and a serious art.

Nowruz

The new year at the spring equinox is around three thousand years old, predates Islam, and is celebrated across Central Asia and beyond. The haft-sin table of seven symbolic items, the fire-jumping of Chaharshanbe Suri and the thirteenth-day picnic outdoors are all part of it.

Food and cinema

Rice cooked for its crisp base, stews built on herbs, pomegranate and walnut, saffron, and tea drunk through a sugar cube held in the teeth. Iranian cinema — Kiarostami, Panahi, Farhadi — has a standing at international festivals that few national cinemas match.

Persian — called Farsi by its speakers — is the official language. It is Indo-European, related distantly to English and French rather than to Arabic, though it is written in a modified Arabic script and has absorbed a great deal of Arabic vocabulary.

Around half the population speaks something else as a first language: Azerbaijani in the north-west, Kurdish in the west, Luri, Balochi, Arabic and Turkmen elsewhere. Almost everyone also speaks Persian.

English is spoken by younger people, in hotels, and by guides, and much less by older people and outside the cities. Numerals are often written in Persian forms, which is worth learning to read for prices and bus numbers.

A few words are genuinely useful: salaam for hello, merci — borrowed from French and used constantly — or mamnoon for thank you, bebakhshid for excuse me, and chand? for how much.