Iran 2017 - Part 3 - The Tehran Bazaar

Deep in Tehran my party and I hit an intersection.   Across from us the street gave way to cobbles, along which and off to the right a square was cut into the linear streetscape. Here were set two platforms at right angles. Crowds milled and pushed about them. We nuzzled in to get a closer look.

 The platforms were lined with moustachioed men with perfect hair. They gesticulated wildly.  One, a large man, who seemed to be in charge, looked at me and shouted a word I didn't catch or understand, I stared blankly and waved.  We saw now that it was an auction The crowd bid for gold coins which sat in cases like picture frames at the men's feet.

Gold Coin Auctioneers

We broke away and found, just beyond and beneath an old arch pointed like a leaf, a short stairway leading down to a street arched over - seething and stretching away to an interior horizon: a morass of colour filtered on a bed of chador black. Shoppers shuffling beneath rich banners in luminous green and black.  We battled our way in.

The bazaar is huge.  Someone, some time long past, had taken the entire central part of Tehran and had roofed it over - like the streets and alleys beneath it this roof is a trifle erratic.  Some sections, such as that which led from our entrance, were solid, old, well built; artistic even, the walls a honeycomb of shops.  Further inside the walls took on the aspect of older streets and decrepit warehouses; the roof above suddenly a slanted sky of corrugated iron, higher now then sweeping low.  Large pieces missing.  In parts more is missing then there is extant, and is almost a street again. In one particular case a single ramped piece of roofing stood over the riddled shops on its own, a slant perched upon stilts. 

Balloons?

Beneath it all is the bazaar, which sells a bewildering amount of things.  One expects Persian carpetry and one gets it, but are other whole streets dedicated to the most random of ephemera: Balloons, bikinis and stationary, calculators, light bulbs and shoes, spices, gears, sticks and tracksuit tops.  Plastic bags dominate a sidestreet, great big barrels full and sorted by type.  A keg of yellow bags with smiley faces, a box of white bags with a crude drawing of Iran.

 Everyone is catered for, and then catered for again five times over; for where there is one shop selling a specific type of running short there are a dozen.

Invariably this replication of function meant that the majority of shops were empty of shoppers.

Earlier on for example we came across an empty carpet quadrant, big rectangles of stacked weave sat with their owners: bored men sleeping and chatting to the carpet men next door.  They glanced at us as we ambled by, not one tried to lure us in to secure a sale.

These bubbles of peace were in stark contrast to the covered alleys outside.

In one tangled street a firetruck sat wedged,  pedestrians diminished to a squeezed single file, their backs against the flaking wall.  How had it gotten so deep into this mass of humanity and brickwork? Another question to add to the pile.  A fireman stood on the roof, just behind the lights, it seemed he was trying to fix an over hanging leaking pipe using a bamboo stick with a hook on the end.

Elsewhere in the labyrinth of the bazaar seemingly narrow alleys open up into huge chasms as you pass - sudden huge galleries snap into focus: staircases disappearing up and down and down again,  - huge warehouses that disappear again as you move back out of phase with them- one we dived into and through, it transitioned into a super modern sci-fi styled bazaar, all mirrors and steel. Mannequins scattered about, whole, or in bits and pieces - legs, arms, torsos, the aftermath of some horrific glamorous battle: legs wedged on banisters, bodies tied to walls; one shop we passed sold children's leggings, its window display a riot of detached children's legs.

Outside a shop with a muddy floor that sold sticks a man approached and asked us to come back to his home.  He seemed friendly and walked with us for a while. He asked 5 times if we would stay with him, only on the fifth polite refusal was he satisfied.  For 10 minutes more he ambled along beside us with his blue check shirt and wiry black tache, then hospitality satisfied he left us with a wave.


We were an hour inside the belly of this merchant beast.  Outside a skittish Kurdish fellow directed us towards a fairly swish restaurant: sheets of glass on marble tables.

Due to a miscommunication I ordered twice as much as everyone else; it was an expense I could little afford and as a result I was in a tense mood for a good portion of the rest of the afternoon. The food, rice and lamb, was good though,  and once we were done we headed north to the old part of the city.


The Old city wasn't at all what I expected, indeed it turned out to be something of a slum - a grid of corridors, alleys really, made up of one storey houses.  In some places wattle and dawb formed ancient doorways and lintels, beautiful pieces picked out, moulded into fragmentary blocks and structures; but it all seemed disused, forgotten. Rubble was strewn across grey filthy squares, the saddest football field in the world sat disused and feral cats with swollen faces picked at bags of trash.  There was nobody about except for the usual cheerful men on motorbikes who chugged by every thirty seconds, a shout of "Howah You?"  dissipating in their wake.

Howahh Youuuuu!!

Beyond we wandered, coming upon the huge rectangle of a communications centre: an Orwellian mass of concrete with a yellow grey cubist depiction of the BT tower jammed on top.  We crossed a busy junction past a '24 hour electronic branch' -  a bank that looked a fortified mosque, then onto a street dense with strange shops and surprisingly leafy trees.  It was, it seemed, a lighting district, 41 or so shops selling lights: 20 shops dedicated to your standard square office roof light (mounted on special square stands in the window displays) 20 more for chandeliers glinting through the windows, all oily bronze and unbrowsed and then a single shop selling tall thin street lamps, row upon row lined up inside, shopping aisles like miniature Parisian streets.  They were of a far grander model then the lamps on the street outside.

Communications Centre

We came to end of the lighting quadrant and came to one of electronics: a door bell district, a clutch of shops selling wires; a collection of stores that sold the buttons one might find on a piece of factory machinery; some had keys, some lit up.

We peered in to shop after unfathomable shop as all the while motorbikes barged past, men popped comically out of manholes covers clutching wrenches, and Tehran hurried by carrying boxes and bundles to who knows where.

Button Shop

On this whole stretch of street I spotted perhaps two women.  In Tehran, generally, they were a stylish lot and I was continually fascinated by the adaptation of the Chador to the needs of fashion.  You can tell a fashion conscious Iranian female by the way her Chador is pulled back to appear almost casual. Hair is revealed at the forehead. I noted that tight jeans were common in the shops I passed and I saw quite a few bikinis for sale in the bazaar.

I was to read later that after the imposition of the Chador, conservative parents felt it safer to send their girls to University, and perhaps surprisingly, a large percentage of executive positions in Iran are held by women.  However from a general survey of the street I now stood on, it seemed that that copycat entrepreneurship is a male domain.  No woman is foolish enough to open a shop selling a single type of circuit board on a street that already has 17 different outlets offering the same ludicrously specific thing.

What percentage of Iranian men own a shop? This was what our party discussed as we reached the end of this oddball avenue, here was the German embassy, huge photos of Berlin, Hamburg and Munich enlivened the exterior walls right next to a large brutal sign forbidding photography.  Across the road squatted the marble facade of Iran's Central Bank, we had heard there was a jewelry exhibition within, but it was closed.  We saw only the foyer, all inlaid teak and cramped.

We were lured into a Currency Exchange next door by some competitive rates and exchanged a lot of cash over the wooden and glass counter.  Outside we were immediately approached by a man with an American accent, he was with his family, a brother and a father, they spoke no English.  The father was small, bearded and tweedy, rosary beads clutched in his hand, the trailing ends penduluming from his fist as he watched his son approach us.

He said he was studying in Poland but had returned to meet his Afghani family in Tehran.  The others asked him if he knew where we might find good coffee, but the scenario set my alarm bells ringing at pitch.

He led us around the corner to what turned out to be the dining room of a fancy, faded  vaguely colonial looking hotel.  The curtains were green, the tables large and strangely thin, it was a big bright over saturated place.  The others sat happily and questioned these Afghan men, but I was suspicious and so: tense. 

Later I realised that I was being foolish, somehow I didn't see that the others were cross questioning these men, of course they were suspicious too, but I thought them foolish.  My instincts are an edifice years of independent travel in the making, and they are not easily dismissed.

It was something I would struggle with in Iran, finding a way to accept the all too common generosity one encounters.  These Afghan men meant well and we chatted with them for a while over strange sandy coffee.  I missed most of what was being said, deaf in my anxiety.

But this was still my first day, so it was forgivable and after a quick stop in a strange monolithic supermarket, it was the back to the hostel and to an almost immediate sleep.