Fit for a Queen by Yvonne Van Dongen

If my guide is to be believed, the Queen’s visit to Esfahan in 1957 was something of a debacle.

“Imagine! There was no place to stay!” cried Jafar Torabi, alarmed even now by this breach of courtesy. Iranians are extremely hospitable, trained from birth to treat even the most humble guest as a monarch. Back then, none of the few hotels available was deemed up to scratch. After much consternation and consultation, it was arranged that the Queen would doss down with a wealthy family.

No sooner was this crisis was resolved, when calamity was heaped upon calamity. The Governor of the day, having read a little about England and learned that the English were fond of meadows, ordered the great old oaks and sycamores of the famous Chehel Sotun garden to be cut down and replaced with grass.

Alas, the weather was colder than usual, the seeds lay dormant and even the miraculous properties of mountains of animal dung failed to stimulate the fabled meadow. The grass refused to grow. The dung stunk. The rain came down. On the appointed day the Queen inspected a muddy, smelly morass.

“When the Shah saw it he was very angry. The Governor, he was embarrassed,” lamented Jafar.

After Her Royal Highness left, a period of breast-beating and blame broke out until finally the Shah decreed that Esfahan needed a top hotel. The hapless Governor replanted the devastated meadow with saplings and everyone tried to forget the incident.

Well, not quite. Go to Esfahan now and it’s as if the whole city were forever readying itself for an impromptu royal visit. Esfahan, often called the Florence of Iran, now boasts the country’s most famous and fabulous hotel, the Abassi, built in response to the royal crisis. Litter is non-existent. The city is obsessed with parks, landscaping every last piece of public land, and lucky visitors enter Esfahan via a grand tree-lined boulevard called Chahar Bagh Street. The saplings in Chehel Sotun garden, though still not a patch on the pre-1957 stumps loitering in the shade, are now tall and statuesque. Just a stroll away from this elegant garden you come to a square, of which the guide asked,

“Have you ever seen anything like it?”

I mumbled something about Paris, Rome, and Venice and immediately felt graceless and ashamed. The more I looked the more lovely Naghsh-e-Jahan Square, now called Imam Square, became. Not only is this enormous rectangle home to one of Iran’s most gracious and well-proportioned mosques whose turquoise blue dome and minarets rival the colour of the sky, but halfway down there’s another buff cupola; opposite that is the six-storey Alí Ghapu Palace of the Safavid kings. In the middle of the square are large oblongs of green grass (veritable meadows), an enormous pool with dancing water fountains and rows of horses and carriages which anywhere else would look as if they belonged in Disneyland. Here on the edge of the desert, surrounded on three sides by arid mountains, with the dust swirling around, they’re infinitely more in keeping with the essence of the place than the cheek-by-jowl Paykans (aka Hillman Hunters) which jostle for supremacy on the road.

Best of all is the uniquely realistic vision of the Islamic architect who recognised that while people need to pray and kings need to be housed, everyone needs to shop. Wherever there’s a mosque, there’s a bazaar. Commerce holds the symmetrically placed architectural flourishes of the mosques and the palace together in a neat fusion of absolutely regular arched, two-storey shops. Here, under labyrinthine covered arches, one can buy items as varied as ceramics, carpets, silver, brass, miniatures, tiles, saffron, pistachio nuts and henna.

Not far away I heard someone whisper that it was like a demonstration of perspective in a manual of geometry.

“It’s divine,” I muttered, abashed. Jafar looked suitably triumphant.

“The name of it is called the design of the world,” he said grandly. “You know kings used to play polo here, but it was also used for festivals, for marching, for executions and for games like archery contests.” He leaned towards me conspiratorially. “Shall I tell you something about the marching? When the Shah wanted to impress foreign visitors he would have the army walk through one end, go out the other, change into another uniform and come in again. The army looks very big that way.”

I’d been in Iran long enough not to be surprised by this. Iranians have a fondness for hyperbole and the grand gesture that baffles and sometimes irritates the outsider. A quick greeting includes at least a query as to the person’s happiness, their wife’s happiness, their child’s happiness, a wish that God keep them safe and that, if necessary, the speaker will sacrifice their eyes for the person in question. In the case of my guide it meant encountering all his former teachers, classmates and business colleagues and having conversations like this:

“This is a man I learned much from. That’s why I should respect him and that’s why I always like him.”

“Ah, but a pupil should always surpass his teacher. He was very good student. You have here the best guide in Esfahan.”

“Ha ha, you know I have here one flower,” pointing to me. “I am teaching one flower. Such a beautiful flower. You are making me jealous,” and so on.

It was hard to believe that Jafar spent most of his life in the purchasing section of a poly-acrylic factory. He seemed determined to woo me with impromptu purchases of saffron ice cream dusted with pistachio nuts, surprise walks to look-out points and, best of all, tea and hubble-bubble in one of the city’s eccentric teahouses under the arches of a bridge.

On the day we were supposed to look at a two and a half thousand year-old fire-temple of the Zoroastrian religion we drove quickly past what he obviously considered fairly dull ruins, opting instead to inspect lovingly fields of cherries, quince, pomegranate and pansies growing on the banks of a river. It came as no surprise to learn that the Persian word for paradise is the same as that for garden.

One of the benefits of the revolution apparently is that where once there were large houses owned by the wealthy, now there are public parks. By far the most famous garden in Esfahan is Chehel Sotun, home to the Palace of Forty Columns, the Safavid shah’s delicate pavilion for public audiences. Here my guide had another surprise in store for me.

“Count them,” he said. “There are only 20 pillars, yes?”

Jafar put the moment on pause. His eyes twinkled and when he smiled, his teeth looked bigger and whiter than ever.

“Ahhh, but the reflection in the water makes it 40. Some people say it is the reflection which makes it 40. See? But I don’t say that. I say that when I say something to you, half of it is not right.”

He let out a booming self-congratulatory guffaw.

I’ve been wondering about that Queen story ever since.