Blog

Echoes of Polish Isfahan

There was once a time when the streets of Isfahan echoed to the sounds of Polish songs, when thousands of little Polish girls made their

Read More »

Forgotten Poet

How can I write? The paper is so small and the sorrows of the world so great they reach up to the stars. How am

Read More »

Journey to Alamut

“In a beautiful valley enclosed between two lofty mountains was created a magnificent garden stored with every delicious fruit and every fragrant shrub…By means of

Read More »

Polish War Cemetery at Anzali

The grand, wrought iron gates of the Polish wartime cemetery have not been opened for decades and are permanently padlocked. Entrance can be gained using

Read More »

The Moon-Maker of Khorassan

“The Moon of Nakhshab” was the most famous creation of Hashim ibn Hakkim, the Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, known sometimes as Mah-sazanda (the moon maker).

Read More »

The Riddle of Natanz

I have always been drawn to those who are dangerous in some way: those who love too passionately, who think (and act) too radically, whose

Read More »

The Hollow Hills of Nain

If you travel a hundred miles or so eastwards out of Isfahan, through a landscape of pink-coloured mountains and desert wastes inhabited by strange willowy

Read More »

Uncovering a cover up

Iranian film director Khosrow Sinai has been awarded the prestigious “Knights Cross of the Order of Merit of the Polish Republic”. At a ceremony earlier

Read More »

Treading softly

“There is a city somewhere beyond the seas Where windows open on illumination… Where the earth listens To the music of your heart And the

Read More »

Oldest Living Iranian

On the Silk Road from Yazd to Shiraz, in the desert city of Abarkuh, stands the oldest living being in Iran (perhaps in the whole

Read More »

Language of Terror

It was only later, long after the events of 9/11, that I finally realised I was a terrorist. The realization did not come easily, or

Read More »

The wild soul

[She] loved as in our age People already do no longer; as only The wild soul of a poet Is still condemned to love (Pushkin)

Read More »

Ancestral soil

Ancestral soil – I don’t mean “the fatherland”, the nation-state, the racial or linguistic group to which a person belongs. I mean the dirt and

Read More »

The lost requiem

There are gaps in our history, lost episodes in our collective memory caused not by forgetfulness, but by the deliberate policy of governments and politicians.

Read More »

Na Koja-abad

For me (and probably for most other people in the “West”), Iraq is distant and inaccessible enough to qualify as a “never-never-land”: a kind of

Read More »

Buried treasure

Sometimes old buildings possess the virtue to express far better than words the fears and uncertainties of nations or religious groups. The old Zoroastrian houses

Read More »