Goudar gourmet
Roast pork from northern Iran
May 2, 2005
iranian.com
When he was all of two-years old, Stan used
to reach and pounce a sip of my beer when I was not looking. One
evening at his home we were gathered around the dinner table and
the conversation somehow spread to Old Vienna. As the boy was reaching
for my glass, I gently sought to dissuade him by promising that
when he turned eighteen I personally would accompany him to Vienna
where he can have a decent drink of beer.
This April I made good
on that promise, as Stan and his father and my son and I flew
to Vienna and descended upon a friend who was on an academic sabbatical
there. That he, I call him Sabatico, be a part of this story
too
is because during one of his sabbaticals he had written an article
on Iranian cuisine, in which he had made the observation that
because of Islam there has been no tradition of eating pork in
Iran, even
though some tribes in Western Iran used to hunt and eat boar.
Wiener schnitzel is a favorite repast in my household, as every
Tuesday night I cook up a storm around this basic notion of breading
and frying a pounded piece of veal, chicken or pork and serve it
up with potato-and-lettuce salad. My son is the ultimate judge
of my culinary efforts.
No sooner than we met up with Sabatico at his flat than we trooped
down to the neighborhood restaurant for our first encounter with
Wiener schnitzel and a tall cold glass of Ottakringer Beer. We
did not care about the academically valuable observation by Sabatico
that Austrians usually make the schnitzel out of pork and drink
mostly wine. A veritable Weiner schnitzel from veal would be just
fine, and the beer was just we all needed.
During our self-paced sightseeing tours we often stopped to replenish.
One day as the dads sat at one table and the boys were seated at
another, I caught a glimpse of Stan, a self-professing more-orthodox-than-reformed
member of the Jewish faith, explaining to my son why he has abjured
pork. “I respect your values,” said my son, “but
I do enjoy a slab of bacon every now and then and will not give
it up for anybody.” And so as I involuntarily thought about
Sabatico’s rumination about the influence of Islam on Iranian
cuisine I ordered a ham sandwich for lunch and thought of the Goudar.
In the waterlogged rice fields of northern Iran the summer air
is often perforated by the sound of the beating of washing pans
(tasht) that the night watchmen drum in order to scare away the
boars (goraz). For sport alone, in the depiction of Iranian hunt
scenes, pre-Islamic and later, a boar is shown at the receiving
end of a spear or arrow. In the bas-relief at Taq-e Bostan in Kermanshah
a Sasanian king is shown at a boar hunt; many similar scenes have
been repeated in ornamental objects like textiles, vessels and
such.
In Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, the young and hotheaded
hero Bijan was itching to fight the goraz, promising
to slay the pigs (khouk). The King, finding his bravado
too much to bear, asked another hero, Gorgeen Milad, to accompany
Bijan on the perilous campaign.
On the trail, they built a huge fire and had just taken wine and
kabob that Bijan noticed ruffling sounds coming from the woods
and ordered Gorgeen to check it out. When Gorgeen refused, Bijan
stormed into the woods like a drunken elephant and gave chase to
the pig, which he cut in half by a single stroke of his short sword
(khanjar) to the pig’s side. In another story, when
Eskandar reached the Eastern Sea, he was greeted with waves of
goraz,
which his army slew in such large numbers that the
heap of carcasses blocked the army’s own way.
In these epic struggles, the boars were no slouches either. Every
now and then a boar would bag the macho. According to Abu Mansur
Salabi’s Shahnameh (written in Naishahpur between
1016-1020 AD), the Ashkanian (Parthian) king Goudarz II ended up
with a broken
neck when his steed shied from the injury inflicted by the curved
tusks of a boar and bucked its rider. The Gorgan ruler Voshmgeer,
son of Ziyar, too, met a similar end.
I do not know if any of the pigs, wild pigs and boars slain in
the Shahnameh or other accounts made it into the barbeque pit or
stew. Nor can I tell you about when the tribes in Western Iran
began and ended the practice of hunting and eating boars. I can
say this, however, Western and Eastern Iran are more geographically
separated than culturally divided. In my own ancestral homeland
in northern Iran whole areas (usually called mahaleh or kuy) were
devoted to Gorji, Armenian, Kurd, Fars and Baluch ethnics, to name
a few, who one time or another came or were brought from other
parts of Iran to settle among us since Timurid times if not earlier.
One of the more remarkable people in my ancestral homeland east
of Gorgan in the 19th century was the Goudar and they had a roasted
pig recipe to die for.
I first leaned about the Goudar in Masoud Golzari’s edition
of Gregorii Melgunof’s “Travels on the Southern Littoral
of the Caspian Sea.” The work was published originally in
Russian in St. Petersburg in April 1863. The German translation
of the work by J. Th. Zenker appeared in Leipzig in 1868. Meanwhile
in Tehran, in the 1880s, the original in Russian was translated
into Persian by one identified only as Petros, a government translator,
and the translation was called “Safarnameh navehi-e shomali
iran.” The Golzari edition of the work was published in Tehran
(1364 shamsi) as “Safarnameh-ye Melgunof beh savahel-e junubi-e
Darya-ye Khazar.”
 According to the Russian traveler Gregorii Melgunof, the Goudar
lived in most of the villages of Kuhsar and Fenderesk districts;
they were neither town-dwellers nor villagers, but rather pastoral,
roaming in every direction. They made a living as laborers and
guardians of the plains. The Goudar were shunned by those who came
into contact with them in the villages; they had no religion and
ate pig meat. They possessed no rule or custom for marriage. They
settled their disputes by recourse to a third among them as arbiter.
The Goudar were famous for shooting and they hunted tigers and
leopards. In their locations they outnumbered the Torkaman and
where they inhabit the Torkaman dared not attack. This tribe had
no particular tongue of its own; the Goudar spoke the Mazandarani
dialect of Persian and Torkaman and generally were quick to learn
a local language.
What the Petros and Golzari editions of Melgunof’s account
left out from the aforecited passage was the Goudar’s recipe
for preparing pig! “They cook the pig,” wrote Melgunof, “in
its skin and before they cook it, pour butter over it; afterwards
they throw the skin to the dogs.” What is more remarkable
than the suppression of this passage in the Persian translations/editions
of the work, no doubt because of Islamic considerations, is the
survival of the Goudari pork roast in the midst of a region known
for its heavy dose of religiosity, so much so that at one time
Gorgan was known as “Dar al-Momenin”, City of Believers.
In contrast to Melgunof’s description, the article on “Astarabadh” in
Encyclopaedia of Islam (vol. I, 1913) described the Goudar as an
energetic tribe living in many villages of Mazandaran and Astarabad,
where they engaged in agriculture, cattle-rearing, cultivation
of silk and drying fruits, and they were despised by the Persians.
In any event, I have not focused much on the origin of the Goudar
tribe in Fenderesk and Kuhsar. I have a few guesses though. At
one level, their settlement in the mountain regions of eastern
Gorgan, such as the name “Kuhsar” and topography of
Fenderesk imply, may be reason enough to equate the name Goudar
with Kuhdar, meaning either the “lord of mountain” or
from the word Kuhyar, meaning mountain-folk. Both possibilities
have considerable etymological evidence to support them, but it
is unlikely that this pastoral and plains-people were mountain
types.
Then there is always the possibility of the Goudar descending
from or being affiliated in their history with a person named Goudar(z),
a name that occurred among the Parthian (Ashkanian) kings of Iran,
in particular as the name of a prince who held sway in the Gorgan
region for a while.
 The best explanation for the origin
of the Goudar of Kuhsar and Fenderesk is that they belonged to
an ancient people. The German
Orientalist Wilhelm Geiger (“Civilisation of the Eastern
Iranians in Ancient Times,” vol. II, 1886) identified the
Avestan servile class of Vaisu with the Chudra of the Brahmanic
society and the Luris that dwelt in Baluchistan. Gypsies and menial
workers, Luris lived in small parties formed of a couple of families.
They belonged to no particular race, had no landed property, nor
cultivated the fields of others. They were partly vagrant musicians,
wandering from village to another, and partly engaged in humble
industries, such as pottery, rope-making and mat-knitting. The
Luris were induced by the Sasanian king, Bahram Gur, to emigrate
from India to Iran.
My money is on the Goudar being remnants of a people known to
the Achaemenians as Saka (Scythians to Europeans) and
who in 1st century AD migrated in large numbers into Sistan (hence
the name
Sakastana, Sagastan of the Sasanian, land of Saka, before the Arab
invasion) and northwest India. A short description by G.P. Tate
in his book “Seistan,” written about 1905 and published
in Quetta, Pakistan, in 1977, makes the connection. Of Saka origin,
he wrote, the Goudar or Gujar of Sistan originally migrated to
Sistan from beyond the Oxus River in Central Asia. The Goudar who
lived in Harat-Kandahar region of Afghanistan and in Iran, in his
time, were agriculturalists and herdsmen, and bore matchlocks.
In complexion they were brown, in appearance they were squalid
and their women were unveiled. The Goudar of the town of Ashraf
on the Caspian Sea were regarded as pariah. In India, however,
the Goudar received even less respect: “A desert is better
than a Gujar. Wherever you see a Gujar hit him; when all other
castes are dead make friends with a Gujar!”
The location of the Goudar in Ashraf is significant for the kind
of wild life that abounded there. According to “Daret al-Moaref
Sarzamin va Mardom Iran” [Encyclopaedia of Iranian Land and
People] by Abdolhossein Saeedian (Tehran, 1360 shamsi), the place
was known originally as Kharguran, which was then changed to Panj-Hezar.
Beginning with the Safavid period in Iranian history at the turn
of the 16th century the place was re-named Asiabsar, which Shah
Abbas I the Great then changed to Ashraf, which then became Behshahr
at the time of Reza Shah. The town is in on the Caspian coast opposite
the Miyankala Peninsula that has been home to a prosperous wild
boar (Sus scrofa) population.
 One way to control the wild pig and goraz population is for the
government of the Islamic Republic of Iran to lift the religious
prohibition on consumption of pork, just as the Ayatollah Khomeini
lifted the prohibition on the eating of sturgeon and thus promoted
the decimation of the species, perhaps unwittingly. In Baku, Azerbaijan,
another Moslem country, despite the Koranic precepts of sureh 5,
ayeh 3 of al-Maidah, some Azerbaijani restaurants serve pork by
the name “donuz” or wild boar by the name “gaban” and
they are raking in the hard currency!
When in Vienna, I asked for schnitzel of pork and thought of
my Iranian countrymen the Goudar of Eastern Iran.
About
Guive Mirfendereski practices law in Massachusetts (JD, Boston College Law
School, 1988). His latest book is A
Diplomatic History of the Caspian Sea: Treaties, Diaries, and Other Stories (New
York and London: Palgrave 2001)
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