Shaykh Bahaie is renowned as a polymath – theologian, mathematician, philosopher, poet and physician – during the reign of Shah Abbas I. My favourite invention of his is an angled-stone sundial at the Masjid-e Shah in Isfahan, the shadows of which accurately indicate prayer times.
Nearby Bahaie’s hamam in Isfahan (the water of which was famously warmed by a single continuously-lit candle); is a camel oil-mill which apparently also belonged to him. This is now derelict, with huge dusty tree-trunks suspended high up in the shadows of the vaulted hall.
However, Rodkin, in the late 1930s/early 1940s visited a working opium press in a very similar location to Bahaie’s oil-mill. Camels did the initial grinding of the seeds into cakes:
“. . it all looked too fantastic for use. Weights and counterpoises and pulleys and levers, more Heath Robinson than Heath Robinson, littered the place . . A blindfolded camel towered hugely above us as he plodded his slow way round the grinding machine, dragging with him the large round stone, like a foot-thick cartwheel, tethered to a central pin. As he walked, he groaned . .”
Then, for the actual pressing, the seed-cakes were piled up in the oil well. After initially winching a smaller beam down, it was time to move the huge tree trunk into action:
“The working of it required all three of them [two boys and a man] on the pole. Each in turn, they climbed to the top of the pole with the other two clinging below them and flung themselves up and out with a cry like a Highland dancer, bringing the whole force of their falling bodies to swing them past the dead point . . In rhythm they threw themselves out all together at the shout of the boy . . Each time they did it, more effort was required . . And oil began to ooze from the oil well, a trickle at first, swelling, as the beam came down, to a stream”
Bahaie wrote the first comprehensive handbook of Shii ritual and law (Jame-ye Abbasi) and is extremely unlikely to have profited from opium. However, since opium poppies were commonly cultivated in Iran in the nineteenth century ( to the two sepia photos to see this), perhaps his oil mill was later converted for opium pressing? As for the hamam, according to Bahaie’s own instructions, the candle’s fire would be put out if its enclosure was ever opened. This happened during restoration and repair of the building and no one has ever been able to make the system work again. Click here for a 5-minute film – in English – on Bahaie’s hamam, and here for one of those vertiginous 360 panoramas of another oil-mill.