Yazd & dual cooling the Oasis

The night melted into dawn as I drifted in and out of Travel-Calm induced sleep aboard the Ya Hussein! bus that is strapped with disco lights on the front and painted with giant wings spitting fire on its side. The TV above the driver is blank and black. The purple-themed Iranian art-house movie about a man finding love after his young family perished in a car crash seemed to have closed in a very melodramatic end. The passengers on the bus slept like babies, and the soft dawn light warming on their faces made them look even more calm and content. Through my sleep dusted eyelids, the landscape was like a caramel river of a lumpy soft brown sand, some small hills dusted with snow on top of the peaks, and a pinkish orange dawning sky sat low and drifting on the land, densely but softly like a mist, or like strawberry and peach whipped cream drizzled but not stirred onto this luscious sweet tasting plate of wondrous never-ending indulgence.

Concrete buildings and murals of the Iran-Iraq War martyrs appear on the sides of the road again as we pulled into Yazd.

Yazd is a town deep in the ‘livable’ part of the desert wedged between the vast Dasht-e Kavir desert in the North and the Dasht-e Lut in the East. It is claimed to be on of the oldest living towns in the world, ie. it has been apparently continuously inhibited for about 7000 years. With its strategic position in the desert, it thrived as a major commercial centre as generations of camel caravans would stop by here for refreshments and trading in its caravansaries. A very vibrant carpet weaving heritage and industry developed (both historically and presently) and later became a major stop on Marco Polo’s Silk Route linking central Asia to the Middle East.

The Yazd old town is a mud-brick built maze that is unique in its look, feel and appeal. It really does amaze an outsider to think that material clumped with mud, water and straw and sun-dried, and pretty much like ginger-bread, could last 7000 years – but it has because it is geographically and climatically perfect for it. The lanes wind around and around, sometimes turn into tunnels under arches, sometimes leading to public courtyards or gardens shared by the townspeople. There are door ways randomly opening everywhere. Some are elaborately carved wooden gateways, some are rusty painted metal frames, some are openings leading down dark stairwells to qanats – the underground wells which connect to a complicated underground irrigation system (see below). Its not hard to climb up to a high vantage point and admire the hundreds of badgers – the large wind towers rising above the domed roofs that reminded me of graceful ancient Greek pillars.


This desert town has, for all those thousands of years, used (and still uses) this fascinating and clever dual system of qanats and badgirs to support their livelihoods in such a harsh desert environment. I know I have an unhealthy penchant for Wikipedia, but this great link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat and diagram really does explain the system very well. The badgirs act as self cooling device for both the desert houses and the qanats that provide the household, the town and its agriculture watered. It really is the perfect and most environmentally friendly way of surviving the desert weather. The qanats are vastly networked with the irrigation system of several adjoining towns and they can be up to 50kms long. But with the changing climate and rainfall and also the ability and willingness of the modern generations of keeping them clean and networked, the qanats are waning very quickly in Iran.

We relaxed Hotel Vally and later Silk Road Hotel, typical traditional desert houses (khan-e sonnati) in this area that is elaborately decorated and architecturally designed to suit the hot summer and cold winters, and to work with the qanats and badgirs. Typically it is a square shaped house with an open air court yard with a pool in its middle linking to the qanats, that cools the yard. In the winter large canopies would be erected to cover the top as a temporary ‘roof’, which prevents central heating from leaking from the court yard. The sides of the yard is furnished with large day-beds, sort of flat couches lined with carpet and big comfortable pillows where you can sip tea, eat meals and smoke a shisha while admiring the pool and the botanies planted in gorgeous clay pots around the garden
......................................................

Later in the afternoon we met up with Saeed, a middle-aged man we met in Tehran who invited us to visit him and his garment factory in Yazd.
Saeed kindly invited his English teacher, a young Iranian guy to help him show us around town first, but it was a stereotypical lost-in-translation/cultural difference sort of situation where we really struggled to follow the commentary as we visited one place to another. We experienced what it might have been like to be a woman in Iran, out and about town with male relatives, completely excluded from ‘male conversation’, and expected to be ready in waiting, as Saeed and his friend engaged in very long conversations with the master/host of the bathhouses and hotels we were taken to, but of course out of politeness we sat patiently pretending that we were OK.

We drove quite a while to Saeed’s factory, just in the edge of town. It was an intricate and very compact medium scaled factory, of approximately 30 or so staff during the day, and manned 24 hours a day. The complex had an array of functions of threading, dying, weaving, pressing and packaging. The thick long rolls of material that is finally produced were mainly for couch and cushion covers, and is part of Yazd reputation for being the region’s central garment and silk production.

Saeed actually plans to set up Persian teaching courses in Europe in a few years time as a ‘side project’, so to thank him for making such a huge effort and taking time out during his busy day, we’ve promised to write him a few poems. (He’s into poems.)
....................................
(Day Trip out to Meybod - another nearby oasis town)










(a pic of me a the bottom of an ancient ice-house - ie. giant fridge of the past, basically an upside down igloo)