In old Tehran, real-estate prices have left almost nothing intact
07-07-2015
Developers are sweeping aside everything from orchards to the capital’s 19th-century architecture in favour of rocketing profits
A gateway: Bagh-e Melli, a government compound in central Tehran which houses Tehran University art school and foreign ministry, among others. Photograph: Armin Hage
Tehran Bureau correspondent
Tehran’s Valiasr Street is a long, winding road with sycamore trees and streams that were once fed all year round by the cool waters of the Alborz mountains – when there was enough snow, and when there was enough water. Known as the longest street in the Middle East, Valiasr spans the city from south to north, and reminds you that Tehran is almost surrounded by mountains, like a bird in cupped hands, as fragile and as transitory.
To walk up this street on any given day, from the deep south to the posh north, is to see history etched on walls and windows. Tehran is a city that has much to remember – when it is able.
Scattered along Valiasr, in random corners, one can find some of the city’s most ignored treasures: 19th-century Qajar and 20th-century Pahlavi-era homes, with their distinctive architecture of colourful gardens and deep basements. But make sure to look in the most unlikely places.
In south Valiasr, north of Mowlavi Street, behind a large sign for the Sheep Butchers’ Union, is the house of Anis al-Doleh, favourite wife of the Qajar king, Nasser al-Din Shah. Her story is a real-life rags to riches tale: the orphaned daughter of shepherds, the shah met her on a hunting trip and brought her to Tehran. She gradually rose to become the most prominent wife and raees-e andarooni, executive chief of the harem.
While the house was registered as a national landmark in 2002, it still operates as the headquarters of the sheep butchers union, and this is not necessarily a bad thing. At least it has guaranteed the house a life.
Inside Anis al-Dowleh’s house Photograph: Tehran Bureau
The home is not large, but rosy and welcoming. A round blue pool dominates the garden, reflecting the trees and wall carvings – as well as the hideous three-storey building next door. The first floor is sealed off as storage space. The second (and main) floor houses the offices of the union and they kindly allow me inside. Delicate carvings of flowers and birds in pastel colours fill every room, all juxtaposed to the sound of sheep auction schedules and slaughterhouse prices that men are yelling over the phone.
A high aluminium pyramid roof indicates that once not long ago it snowed heavily in this area. These days one forgets the snow that covered the entire city throughout winter, even a decade ago.
Tehran is not associated with ancient history: popular opinion knows it as the city of the Qajars and Pahlavis. But as recent excavations suggest, Tehran was settled 7,000 years ago. Even so, the Qajar and early Pahlavi eras shaped modern Tehran in giving it a distinct architecture. Divergent art once defined Iran’s cities: from Qeshm, to Kashan, to Astara, each built according to its locality, climate and artisans. Today, Tehran, like those other cities and more, has been disfigured throughout.
In the Tehran of the most recent centuries, elaborate houses had intricate basements underground, and aab anbar – a deeper basement for water storage. No matter how lavish or simple the home, it almost always treasured a blue pool in the yard around which fruit trees were grown. Windows and doors were wooden, and intricate carvings filled the walls with patterns that became more complex the higher the financial standing of the owner.
Few of these homes remain today, unless renovated by a major organisation. The luckier ones were turned into museums and art houses. Few like the home of Anis al-Doleh were the odd in the bunch that were kept intact but overtaken by random associations.
As recently as the 1930s, Deh-e Vanak in northern Tehran was a farming quarter in the midst of the city. Today, nearby Vanak Square is one of city’s most congested areas, but walk towards the village, and you will still find homes built in the 1920s, 1930s and even earlier. Why have they not been turned to apartment buildings in this frenzy? One wonders.
Ali Vanaki comes from a family that has lived in the village for hundreds of years. “We were farming in this area for centuries, then Reza Shah came along and gave the entire village to his prime minister, Mirza Hassan Mowstofiyol Mamalek. We refused to leave, but many of these homes do not have proper documents, even to this day.”
Despite this, they are still sold for up to 17m tomans (£3,500) per square metre in the winding streets, and 30m tomans (£6,000) for homes with bigger gardens.
Mowstofiyol Mamalek’s grandchildren, in Vanak, remain some of the only old royalty that still live in their grandfather’s orchards and Qajar-era home. The house is sealed off with high brick walls, but is available for wedding photographs at staggering sums. From the trees that peek out behind the walls, one can only marvel at the history of this place. Mowstofiyol Mamalek sold part of the village land to the industrialist millionaire Gashtasb Firouzgar, who in turn sold it to Tehran municipality.
Mowstofiyol Mamalek came from a long lineage of landlords and government treasurers, so they were awarded that title a century before his birth.
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Today, this piece of land is called Baqh-e Irani (the Iranian garden) and is one of the country’s most exquisite open spaces, covering 3.4 hectares. It is a public park but, as its name suggests, with streams and old orchard trees. “Tehran municipality spent a billion tomans on the tulips here alone,” says Vanaki.
Much of Tehran was once khooneh baqhi (houses within fruit orchards), of which the remaining trees in Vanak village and Valiasr Street are but small reminders. Across north Tehran where the most luscious orchards once prospered, developers for decades now dry trees to turn their property into land for lucrative high-rises.
According to Tehran municipality law, an orchard cannot be built upon. So, they dry the trees and then request building permits. That is how the history of this city is wiped away: by burning the flesh of trees.
But in many street corners you will occasionally find an old home still in use. Usually, it’s an elderly couple with children abroad. Once the couple die, the house is sold by the heirs, and the tree drying ensues, followed by an apartment block.
An abandoned mansion in Tehran. Photograph: Armin Hage
A home in Pasdaran Street next to our high school was inhabited by an elderly couple with four children overseas. Once the couple passed away, it became a 15-storey apartment building. “Each of the children made millions,” a neighbour angrily remarks, dissatisfied with the heavy traffic the building has brought to the once idyllic corner.
In north Tehran, except for those few homes salvaged for museums, skyrocketing real-estate prices have left almost nothing intact. Adding to the confusion, are homes that were confiscated right after the revolution, taken over by various organisations, passed through the hands of one developer after the next, to the extent that past ownership is nearly untraceable. One might live in a high-rise that can cost as much as 70m tomans (£14,000) per square metre, not knowing who used to sleep, sit or read on the very grounds upon which the tower was built.
One of north Tehran’s most well-known homes, Baq-e Ferdows or the Mohammadieh palace, now serves as the city’s cinema museum. The house was constructed in Shemiran, near Tajrish Square, in the mid-19th century, but underwent changes in ownership and architecture many times before the cultural ministry took the reins following the revolution.
Iranian scholar Mahmoud Afshar bought large areas of land around the orchard, and subsequently donated them for academic pursuits (like the Dehkohda language institute) which stand to this day. Despite these random reminders, most of what stands of old Tehran must be sought after in downtown and southern areas of the city. The north has been mainly lost.
A rather well-maintained Qajar-era home in downtown Tehran is the house of Qavam ol-Saltaneh, prime minister under both the Qajar and Pahlavi monarchies. Qavam’s house is Abgineh, the glass and pottery museum, which stands on 7000 square metres of land. Wooden windows, long wooden stairways and delicate carvings adorn a building that served both as Qavam’s house and office. The museum space inside the house was designed by renowned Austrian architect Hans Hollein.
The care taken with Qavam’s house is in stark contrast to many other places, including another downtown Qajar-era home, Ettehadiyeh House. To the public, it is known as the home of Dayi-jan(‘dear uncle’) in the popular television adaptation of Iraj Pezeshkzad’s novel My Uncle Napoleon. The historic house sits in ruins, decaying year after year, while Tehran’s Beautification Organisation tries to battle developers who see it as prime real east for a mall. It is located in Lalehzar, in the heart of Tehran’s financial district.
“What can you expect of a city whose many custodians aren’t even from the city?” said architect and urban planner Kamran Safamanesh in a ceremony to remember old Tehran. His remark hinted that many current-day functionaries rose to prominence with the revolution from villages across Iran, and have no understanding of cities, their histories and stories. “A city’s memories are a city’s identity. Wipe them out and nothing remains,” said Safamanesh.
Tehran is certainly not the first city to be overtaken by a development boom. In the last few years, gigantic shopping malls have only meant faster destruction: Palladium, the high-end mall recently opened in north Tehran, sits on grounds of an old orchard that was dried to make way for the mall, built with capital primarily invested by a kebab dynasty known as Raftari.
“I remember the orchard,” a resident says. “Now our neighbourhood has become the parking lot of death.” He is selling up and leaving, as the traffic has made it “impossible” for him to live here anymore, he said.
Although not as old as many others, one of Tehran’s most disputed old homes is the house of Ostad (‘master’) Behzad, the prominent 20th-century miniaturist. This is where some of the most well-known artists and intellectuals of the last century Tehran once gathered.
A gathering of the artists at Ostad Behzad’s, who is at the far right, Ali Karimi and Nosratollah Yousefi. Photograph: Courtesy of Ostad Behzad Facebook page
Behzad’s only son bequeathed the house to the Iranian Heritage Organisation in an agreement that would see the house become a museum. But once the papers were signed, the Heritage Organisation may have forgotten its end of the bargain. Today it serves as a library and storage space for the organisation – somewhere for sleepy, middle-aged ladies in office dress codes to sit around and drink tea with biscuits. The old tiles of the master’s work have been removed, even the street upon which the house sits, once called Behzad, has for years now been changed to Nofallah.
The old homes of Tehran are not only reminders of this city’s past art, but past co-existence. Haroon Yashayayi is a Jewish-Iranian writer who has spent the last few years writing on his beloved Oudlajan, the once predominantly Jewish neighbourhood near the bazaar.
Oudlajan, along with Sanglaj, Arg, Dowlat, Bazaar and Chaleh Meydan were the neighbourhoods that made Tehran-e Asr-e Nasseri, Tehran during the reign of Nasser al-Din Shah, as the dust was rising from a tired, sleepy city journeying to a new, unfamiliar world.
At the time, with nearly 3000 homes, Oudlajan was known as a prosperous place. Today, walking through the back alleyways you would not know this. The overhead domes have been refurbished but it remains deformed and alienated.
“I remember when the street was thriving, when Molook Khanom, a local woman, would walk in the streets and wave hello to everybody,” Yashayayi says, in a talk he gave on his upcoming book of stories of Oudlajan, to be published in Tehran. The neighbourhood is home to Tehran’s oldest synagogues, sealed off to pedestrians, tourists and wanderers.
Home of prominent Zoroastrians also serve as reminders of the city’s past: the house of Arbab Homroz, in east Tehran, was most recently launched as the Iranian National Museum of Graphic Arts. In central Tehran’s Chahar Rah-e Valiasr(the intersection of Valiasr and Enqelab Street) a shining monument seems out of place: this is the Qajar-era home of Rostam Giv, the Zoroastrian parliament member and industrialist who also headed the Zoroastrian association until his death in 1980.
During the presidency of Mohammad Khatami, the house was bought by Jahad Daneshgahi, an educational organisation, and renovated by the Heritage Organisation. It is now a fully functional building that serves as classroom space.
Pirnia was a lawmaker, historian and prime minister at the end of the Qajar era. This home is not simply a historic artefact. Within its walls, one of 20th century Iran’s most significant events took place: the writing of the constitution following the Constitutional Revolution of 1906.
These homes connect the memory of Tehran. Qavam did the writing, Pirnia provided the space. The constitution and the house both suffered the same fate: under rubble. A huge hole was dug for the mall - which has not been built - but permanently damaged the main building.
Emarat-e Masoodiyeh, Masoodiyeh palace, constructed on the orders of Zel-ol-Soltan, son of Nasser al-Din Shah, sits on five hectares of orchards. It has a remarkable facade with incredible carvings, disguising the fact it is crumbling from the inside.
Masoodiyeh palace in Tehran, Iran.
The house has garnered mainstream attention unlike any other in Tehran. In 2014, the Tehran autumn music festival was held there and most recently, the popular band Pallett held a ceremony to release their album on the palace’s grounds with nearly 1,000 fans in attendance. They also have a song dedicated to Masoudiyeh in their new album: Tehran, Smile. None of this has quickened the pace of promised renovations inside the home, run jointly by Tehran’s Beautification Organisation and the Heritage Organisation.
Tehran’s Beautification Organisation, an agency that operates under the municipality, but with its own independent budget, walks on shaky ground. On paper, it is responsible for carrying out artistic projects around the city, and in conjunction with the Heritage Organisation, repairing and maintaining the city’s monuments. While it employs sociologists, artists and architects who understand the worth of the city’s old treasures, it is under the wings of a far larger body, the municipality, that is leading the charge for high-rises and shopping malls.
“It often feels like we have to fight our own limbs,” says an artist who works for the organisation. The municipality seems lost between the thirst for more and more real estate, which yields revenue, and the need to save what is left of the very things that give the city character. Some of Tehran’s most notorious developers sit on the city council, only exacerbating this dilemma.
But so have we, the residents. Our very existence has mutated the shape and look of this city, from 15,000 residents in Qajar times to more than 8 million today. That the rats of Tehran are almost as big as cats not only speaks to the greed of developers, but how cities have come to be in the 21st century. Mass migration from villages and small towns to cities is the fuel driving ever more apartment buildings, more garbage, more waste, the very thirst for more.
A city without a memory may be a city lost. But what makes Tehran’s story flit between the tragic and the uplifting is not just what has been lost but what has been salvaged, repaired, somehow maintained. Part of this city’s story is this push and pull, this battle of opposing forces.
Tehran is a city with a past, and there are walls, homes and even people here to still remind you. If you look carefully, beyond the malls, and the butcher shops.
