Time Travels in Persia

By Heidi Noroozy

Don’t you wish you had a time machine?

I do. But until someone invents one, I have to travel back in time vicariously through books. One of my favorite time-travel novels is Blackout (and its sequel, All Clear) by Connie Willis. These stories, and the others in the series, feature time-traveling historians from the year 2060 who visit England during World War II to observe history in the making. Because they must blend in while observing the “contemps” (short for “contemporaries”), they take jobs and new identities: a shop girl on Oxford Street during the London Blitz, an American journalist at Dunkirk, and a maid in a country manor that has become a shelter for children evacuated from the bomb-ridden cities.

Clearly I was born many decades too soon. Wouldn’t it be cool to travel back in time and see history in the raw—and experience the events than never made it into the history books? But if I had a time machine, I wouldn’t travel back to the Blitz. (How crazy is that?) I’d set the dial for Persia and seek out some of the happening places in the ancient and not-so-ancient world. Here are my top 3 picks for a historical adventure:

A valley in the Alborz Mountains

My first stop will be in 1930, the year that the British explorer, Freya Stark, embarked on her famous, and often hazardous, trek through the Iranian back country. She was searching for the elusive Alamut Castle in the Alborz Mountains, stronghold of the Nizari Ismaili mystics, also know as the Assassins. (A few years later, she also traveled to Lorestan, a region in the Zagros Mountains, near the Iraq border. In The Valleys of the Assassins, Stark’s account of her Iranian adventures, she describes the area as “that part of the country where one is less frequently murdered.”)

It sounds ominous, I know. But along with the bandits, shifty-eyed tribal chieftains, and policemen whose “protection” bribes were only a few cents less than that those of the outlaws, Stark encountered the last vestiges of traditions that even then were starting to die out. She describes breathtaking landscapes, and that exuberant Persian hospitality that Iranians are still famous for today. Equipped with letters of introduction from authorities in Tehran, she charmed her way past the suspicious natures of people unaccustomed to trusting strangers and ended up documenting the Alborz range’s remote valleys for the Royal Geographic Society. Apart from witnessing history as it unfolds, it would be thrilling to watch this fearless adventurer in action.

The problem with time travel is that you can never say goodbye to your new friends. So after we trek back to civilization from the Alamut Valley, I’ll have to slip away to my time machine and set the dial (or maybe it uses a switch—who knows) for another era. I’m heading far into the past, 2,500 years to be precise, to the time of Cyrus the Great.

To blend in, I’ll need a job, so I’m off to join the chapars, those swift relay couriers who carried the mail throughout the vast Persian Empire, crossing from one end to the other in a matter of days. They rode from one chapar-khaneh (courier house) to the next, which were situated as far apart as a man could ride in a day without stopping to feed and water the horse. And at each stop, they switched to a fresh horse and continued the journey.

I’ll need to brush up on my horseback riding skills. But I’m surely in good physical shape now after trekking through the Alborz Mountains in 1930. Wouldn’t the Persian Pony Express be a great way to see a vast and prosperous empire? True, I’d probably take in little of the landscape, galloping across the country at top speed. But surely I’ll get to rest at the end of the ride and, with a little ingenuity, even sneak a peak into the mailbag. Maybe I’ll discover a story or two that never made it into the history books. To get an idea of what my life as a chapar will be like, check out the blog I wrote about Cyrus the Great’s postal service.

Entrance to the Isfahan Bazaar

After these two heart-stopping adventures, 17^th century Isfahan, my final stop on the way back to my own time, will seem almost dull. Or maybe not. It’s not for nothing that Isfahan is called nesf-e jahan (half the world). In the 1600s, after Shah Abbas I built his glorious capital in the Iranian desert, Isfahan became a major stop on the Silk Road. Its squares and bazaars were thronged with people from all over the world. The arts flourished with everything from carpet weaving and miniature painting to bookbinding and calligraphy to tilework and the lovely architecture that still characterizes the city today. Maybe I’ll even get a glimpse of the silk, gold, and silver Polonaise carpets that Abbas commissioned to promote trade with Europe.

What I’d really like to find out, though, is whether there was a tunnel beneath Naghsh-e Jahan Square, connecting Shah Abbas’s Ali Qapu Palace to the Sheikh Lotfallah Mosque. A guide at the mosque once told me it existed at one time, but I’ve never been able to confirm the truth of his words. It is said that the mystery passage was built to allow the shah’s wives to pass from the palace to their female-only house of worship without being seen. Since I’m unlikely to get into the palace (or the mosque) to find the tunnel, I’ll have to suss out the secret from the gossips at the bazaar.

So that’s my whirlwind tour of history. What about you? If you had a time machine, where would you go?

From "Hashish-Eater" to Assassin

Alamut fortification in Iran
Photo by Payampak

By Heidi Noroozy

In 1930, British explorer and travel writer, Freya Stark, undertook an unusual journey across Persia, from the western province of Lurestan to the Caspian Sea. Her travels took her through a remote and as yet unmapped region of the Alborz Mountains called the Alamut Valley, better known to Westerners as the Valley of the Assassins.

Nearly 900 years before Freya Stark’s expedition, Alamut was home to a heretical sect of Shia mystics called the Nizari Ismailis. Their leader, Hassan-i Sabbah, captured Alamut Castle in 1090 and eventually expanded his territory to include 50 fortresses tucked away among the remote mountain peaks.

The Nizaris were a small band of men and their families surrounded by hostile enemies, and Hassan developed a strategy for dealing with threats to his power without sacrificing too many of his own soldiers. He would order them to kill enemy leaders, both political and religious, using stealth, cunning, and ruthlessness. Daggers were the murder weapons of choice, and often the Nizaris would leave a knife on the pillow of a sleeping target as a warning. This band of militant fanatics is long gone now (though the form of Islam that they followed is still practiced in parts of the Middle East and Central Asia), but they’ve left behind a chilling legacy: the word “assassin.”

Linguists disagree on how the term, “assassin,” came into English and other European languages, although most scholars attribute the word’s origin to the Nizari Ismailis, aka the Alamut Assassins. One theory comes from an account by Marco Polo, who visited Alamut in the 13^th century, not long after the sect and their stronghold were destroyed by Mongol invaders.

Castles in Alamut & Rudbar regions, Iran
Photo by Jolle

In his account of the trip, Marco Polo described a ritual in which Hassan-i Sabbah would give his young followers a drink laced with hashish that put them to sleep. He’d then place them in a beautiful garden filled with lovely maidens and wake them up, telling them they were in paradise. Later, when he sent them out on a mission, he’d promise them that if they were successful they’d return to paradise. According to legend, this practice earned the Assassins the nickname, hashishiyyeen, an Arab term meaning “hashish-eater.”

The problem with this theory is that neither Ismaeli nor other Muslim texts offer any evidence that the Assassins ever took hashish, a drug made from the resin of the cannabis plant and not usually administered in liquid form. Marco Polo’s account may have been influenced by the reports of Crusader chroniclers, who encountered the Ismailis on their holy wars. In any case, it’s unlikely that the explorer ever met any Assassins since their stronghold had been destroyed in 1256, when he was only two years old (and 132 years after Hassan-i Sabbeh’s death) .

Another theory is that the Arabic term, “hashish-eater,” had a different, more figurative connotation at the time. It meant “outlaw,” or “disreputable person,” and was likely applied to the Assassins by their enemies and not by the Nizaris themseves.

Hassan and his men called themselves the “asasayoon,” or “followers of the foundation (asas) of faith,” which leads to the third theory, that “assassin” derives from this word.

Siege of Alamut
Persian Miniature

Although this etymology sounds plausible, my money is still on “hashishiyyeen” in the figurative sense as the origin of the word. Usually it’s the victors who write the final chapter of any history, and it makes sense that the Alamut Assassins’ enemies would continue to call them outlaws decades or even centuries after they met their end.

Whatever the real origin of the word, “assassin” entered European languages during the Middle Ages. The Crusaders were frequent targets of Nizari attacks, including Conrad of Montferrat, who was assassinated shortly before being crowned King of Jerusalem. The first Western texts to document the use of the term are the chronicles of these holy wars.

Today, all that’s left of the Alamut Assassins are their crumbling fortresses, a tangle of legends, and a word that still chills the heart.