Water traditionally – and still now – is transported in goat-skins. These keep water and doogh (the traditional yoghurt drink) beautifully cool in the hottest weather. I took ages learning how to properly tie the skins closed.
Kazem is Golsanem’s first child and the whole extended family doted on him. Look at the wee-tube feeding into the cup hanging off the end – a smart move when there are certainly no disposable nappies and the nearest water is a donkey-ride away.
Golsanem is the wife of Morteza’s youngest son and lives with her parents-in-law whilst her husband works up in the hills with the flocks. She works hard all the time. As a young woman, married into the Faridgi family, she is at the bottom of the food hierarchy and so is always hungry. Here she …
Paridjan is Morteza’s wife and mother of their ten children – nine of whom are still alive. Here she is handspinning, whilst grazing the family’s cow in the cemetery where her tenth child is buried. She has been ‘visiting’ her daughter – knocking on the grave with a stone to talk to the deceased in …
Twice a year, the nomad Bakhtiari walk over the Zagros Mountains of SW Iran (3000-5000m elevation). Each family follows traditional mountain paths, taking their flocks between the winter pastures (garmsir) near Lali in Khuzistan province and the summer pastures (sardsir) near Shahr-e-Kord, south west of the ancient city of Isfahan. The photographs here offer an …
Emulating many thousands of pilgrims before me, I walked the final 20km into Mashhad, from the hill where the golden dome of the Shrine could traditionally first be seen. With Mashhad now a sprawling metropolis, this is my first view of the golden dome.
Shah Abbas probably walked over the Elburz Mountains between Nishapur and Mashhad in 1601. In November, when Abbas walked, it is very cold up on the heights; with hoar frost on the grass even at midday, as shown here.
This Shah Abbasi caravanserai in Nishapur (1141km from Isfahan) has recently been transformed into a craft and shopping centre. Abbas himself is more likely to have lodged in the citadel or perhaps a private house when he passed in 1601.
This internal view of Kalidar caravanserai (1087km from Isfahan) illustrates its unusual octagonal shape. It was probably constructed after the reign of Shah Abbas. When I visited, I climbed right over the building to get to the main entrance.
This satellite image shows the remains of the unusual octagonal caravanserai in Kalidar (1087 km from Isfahan). [SA2.21]