I met up with Reza and Coryn Bayegan at Montparnasse cemetery [photos start here] the center of Paris. That’s where Shapour Bakhtiar and several other prominent Iranians are buried, including Ali Amini. I was so focused on taking pictures that — as usual — was not aware of where I was. After taking a few pictures of Bakhtiar’s grave, I walked away and then turned around. I went back and thought about how different Iran would have been if Bakhtiar had held on as prime minister. He was our last democratic head of government. He was not democratically elected, but he believed in a secular democracy. I wonder what he would have reacted to the current movement in Iran. Later we visited the much larger Père Lachaise, east of Paris [photos start here], visiting the gravesites of Sadegh Hedayat, Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde and many others. Thanks Reza and Coryn for this memorable day.
Iranian graves: Shapour Bakhtiar, Abdorrahman Boroumand, Ali Amini, Vahid Hoveyda, Guy Bakhtiar, Houshang Tehranian, Tadjmolouk Afshari, Houshang Vaziri, Hossein Gholi Kyani, Gholam Hossein Sa’edi, Sadegh Hedayat, Parsi Zoroastrians, Tata Parsi family, …
Non-Iranian: Jean-Paul Sartre & Simon de Beauvoir, Serge Gainsbourg, Jim Morrison, Alain Bashung, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Maria Callas, Holocaust victims, Henri Salvador, Edith Piaf,…