Articles > Secret No More

The first thing I did on entering the Homa Hotel in Shiraz was to run inside and look for the sign that my Lonely Planet promised was hanging over the portals in brass.

Where it should have read 'Down With the USA' in beautifully polished brass letters, there was now a pale Farsi inscription praising Allah.

“Bother,” I said to the perplexed doorman, who then said, “No. Good. Is good we have no sign. We take it down only two, three months ago. Is good.”

No doubt he’s still wondering what it is westerners really want. What they get is history, gardens, architecture and hospitality running in the superlatives but, though they might not admit it, the unspoken sub-text is equally as compelling, perhaps even more so. It goes something like this. What’s it really like in this veiled, isolationist, anti-western world of Islamic infidels?

Or, as the nice chap at Auckland Airport’s check-in counter said, “Aren’t you scared?”

In fact, it was a question I’d had to answer on BBC World television for a story highlighting the subtle, but nevertheless, seismic changes in Iran. For the record, I said that this was probably the most hospitable place I’d ever visited, but that I believed that mass tourism would never take off until Iran relaxed the rules on women’s dress - it gets hot wearing a scarf and raincoat all day; alcohol (none whatsoever), and made the use of credit cards and traveller’s cheques possible.

Having completed that we both looked around at the hordes of pale Fins, large-boned Germans and chattering Spaniards pouring out of coaches and the journalist wrapped the piece up by saying that Iran couldn’t take many more tourists anyway because there weren’t enough hotels. He hadn’t even been able to get a room at the Homa.

This was a shame because the Homa, like many of Iran’s top hotels, is the seventies in aspic, a wonderful, awful preservation of design-crime featuring familiar favourites like dull gold velour and chrome you’d thought you’d forgotten. It was rather like meeting an old friend again. Marvellous to see you. You haven’t changed a bit.

Shiraz, on the other hand, is like nothing else I’d seen before in Iran. For a start, the Islamic sub-text seemed less apparent here than in Tehran. Shiraz has fewer brooding portraits of black-browed Khomeini and his rather cheerier-looking successor Khameini, and fewer murals of weeping or cadaverous martyrs - soldiers killed in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war.

It is, if my guide and driver are anything to go by, altogether more joyous and relaxed. My guide, who also moonlights as a history teacher, was as calm and soothing as syrup. Her guiding motto was: “no rush, just sit.”

My driver, on the other hand, seemed to be unsuccessfully moonlighting from fatherhood. He took his 11-month old son everywhere, mostly unstrapped in the front seat or sitting on his lap. Occasionally we also had his wife in the car and on the last day he laughingly produced his brother, two sisters and son who, together with myself and the guide, squeezed into the Hillman Hunter for the journey to the airport. He explained he’d never taken a tourist around before and the sisters explained they’d never seen a woman travel alone before.

Wherever we went we were exhorted to join in family picnics, take tea or share hubble-bubble. When we were relaxing at Hafez’s tomb, at once a monument to a famous poet, a stunning garden and romantic outdoor teahouse, I asked of a genial fellow offering me his pipe,

“Where do you work?” He shrugged.

“Nowhere at the moment,” but later, when he needed money he would. My guide smiled. “People in Shiraz are lazy.”

Later that same day we made it for prayers at another tomb inside the holy shrine of Shah-e-Cheragh which houses the remains of the eighth Imam’s brother. For this I had to rent a chador, a big black sheet of material to drape over myself, endeavouring to look like a walking tent. Indeed chador means tent in Farsi. Next I had to take my shoes off, pass through the silver women’s door, as opposed to the gold and enamel men’s door, and enter.

After a week in Iran I had become accustomed to architectural flourishes, luscious carpets and immodest chandeliers. I’d even seen mirrorwork before but nothing like this. Thousands of tiny mirror tiles have been assembled in an elaborate and dazzling whole. As I endeavoured to absorb this overwhelming fantasy, the scent of rosewater transported me to another realm, even more surreal and childlike. On the periphery of my consciousness I could make out rows of weeping women throwing money and sprinkling rosewater at the tomb, while they made wishes, begged intercession for sick children, or just prayed.

My guide said “no rush, just sit” and soon we were surrounded by young women, some her former students, all curious about me. Mostly, though, they wanted to know what did my country think of Iran and what did I think of Iran? As the rest of the congregation went through their prayer ritual I whispered my best diplomatic answers. By the time I left I’d been given a clay tablet used for prayer and believed to contain some of the soil from Mecca. They’d also extracted promises of my imminent return.

“Shiraz,” said my guide later, “is the secret city.” I said that I thought it was the city of roses and nightingales. “That too” she said “but also the city of secrets because when you come here by land, the mountains are all around and suddenly the city appears. That’s why it’s called the secret city.”

Secret no more, I thought as we joined the rows of coaches exhaling pollutants outside the entrance to Persepolis. Yet how could it have been otherwise? Persepolis is history on a grand scale, a monument to the time 2500 years ago when Persia ruled 28 nations from the borders of northern Ethiopia to India and all the way to southern Russia. Of course, it’s not a patch on founder Darius’s initial conception of a ceremonial palace embodying the best of his empire. The cedar has gone, the gold and jewels have been pillaged, the paint faded, statues broken, brocade lost but it is the very scale of the ruins which cannot fail to move and impress the visitor.

Underscoring the poignant ruins, from here one can also see the ceremonial tent put up for the celebration of 2500 years of monarchy in 1971, an event organised by, and, unwittingly the swansong of, the last Shah.

It doesn’t end there. Not far away are the tombs of four kings and the remains of a pre-Islamic fire temple and, half an hour’s drive away, the Tomb of Cyrus and other remains at Pasargadae.

We were going to go there, until my guide tapped me gently and said,

“Wouldn’t you rather have tea? I know a nice place.”

“Sure,” I said. “No rush, just sit.”

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