Anahita—The Water Goddess

By Heidi Noroozy

Anahita temple in Kangavar, Iran
(with graffiti on one column)

Outside the city of Kangavar in western Iran, a brick wall stretches along the Kermanshah-Hamadan highway. Behind it, tall columns of pale stone rise into the cloudless sky, a sight as unexpected in the arid landscape as the flowering bushes that line the road. These columns, along with the crumbling staircases and rubble that lie at their feet, are all that remain of an ancient temple to one of Persia’s greatest deities, Anahita.

In Persian mythology, Anahita was the goddess of fertility, love (and, strangely, war) as well as all the waters of the world. She also represented justice and wisdom, a quality that many cultures in antiquity associated with water. The goddess is depicted as a voluptuous young maiden with full breasts and a tiny waist. She wears a fur cloak embroidered in gold, a crown of stars and beams of light, and she carries a flowering branch (or sometimes a water jug). In her warrior role, she drives a chariot drawn by four white horses that represent the wind, rain, clouds, and hail. Sometimes, she is accompanied by her sacred animals, the dove and the peacock.

Worship of Anahita dates back to pre-Zoroastrian times. She was a major deity in the pantheon of the Median civilization (728 to 550 BC), which preceded the Persian Empire founded by Cyrus the Great. The Medians, and especially the Magi, their religious sects, referred to her as the Mother Goddess. Not surprisingly, considering her high status among the Medians, the Zoroastrians also incorporated her into their worship, even if she had to accept a demotion from Mother Goddess to guardian angel (yazata). After all, the Zoroastrians were monotheists and worshipped Ahura Mazda (who, incidentally, they also inherited from the Medians) as their only god. The Zoroastrians gave this goddess/angel the name Ardvi Sura Anahita, which means “the High, the Powerful, the Immaculate.” She was believed to have lived among the stars, the brightest of which is the planet Venus (which translates into modern Farsi as “Naheed,” another version of Anahita).

As the Persian Empire expanded, Anahita’s cult spread to other cultures, and she became associated with goddesses honored by the local populations. When Cyrus I conquered Babylon in 539 BC, Anahita blended with Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of war, fertility, and love. When the Greeks conquered Persia several centuries later, leaving their own imprint on the culture, they associated Anahita with Aphrodite, the goddess of love. In Armenia, she was known as Anahit. And the Indian Parsees call her Anahid.

The Magis also made the transition from the Medians to Zoroastrianism, although these religious cults lost much of their power. They continued to promote the worship of Anahita by reading sacred texts dedicated to her and drinking a beverage called haoma, made from a plant of the same name, which is still used in Zoroastrian rituals today. Anahita’s special day, celebrated with abundant feasts, was the tenth day after the new moon in Avan, the eighth month of the Iranian calendar.

Anahita dish in the
Cleveland Museum of Art

Ardashir II (also known as Ataxerxes), who ruled Persia from 405 to 358 BC, was devoted to Anahita. He had statues erected in her honor in all his major cities and built a temple to the goddess/angel in Ecbatana (present-day Hamadan, Iran). Although Alexander the Great laid waste to the temple in 324 BC during his conquest of Persia, it wasn’t completely destroyed until 2006, when local authorities had the site flattened to make way for a musalla, an Islamic prayer hall.

The Anahita Temple in Kangavar was probably built sometime after the one in Ecbatana, during the Parthian era (246 BC to 224 AD), although some archeologists attribute it to Ardashir. I visited the site several years ago on a road trip from Kermanshah to Tehran. Although the temple was discovered in the early 19^th century and excavated 150 years later, it felt as though little work had been done there in decades. Only a few of the round columns stood upright, with most lying broken on the ground. Crumbling staircases led nowhere, and boulders that once formed the temple’s walls were half buried in the soil.

Our guide, well aware of the neglect, apologized profusely for the state of the archeological treasures. He lamented the lack of government funds and pointed out cracks in beams that had been caused not by the ravages of time over millennia but by frost heaves during a recent winter. His concern didn’t stop him from inviting me to touch the marble columns and climb the staircases. After a moment’s hesitation, I couldn’t resist. How often do you get this close to antiquity? Even at Persepolis, Iran’s most famous archeological site, where visitors wander through the remains of ancient palaces, they follow well marked tourist paths designed to protect the monument from damage.

The same year that I visited Kangavar, the temple was submitted to UNESCO for listing as a World Heritage Site. I hope these efforts are successful—and soon—before Anahita’s temple becomes nothing more than a legend, along with the goddess herself.

Diplomacy in Silk

By Heidi Noroozy

Polonaise carpet in the
Iranian Carpet Museum

Let’s take a trip back in time. We’ll set our time machine for early 17^th-century Isfahan at the height of the Safavid Golden Age and tour the city’s blue-tiled mosques, arcaded bazaars, and ornate bridges when they were still brand new. Maybe we’ll catch a polo match with Shah Abbas I and cheer his favorite team from our seats on the high balcony of the Ali Qapu Palace. Best of all, we’ll sink our bare feet into sumptuous wool and silk rugs and feel their soft pile tickle our toes. After all, like me, Shah Abbas had a special place in his heart for Persian carpets. Not only did he fill his palaces with the finest examples, he also made them an important element of trade and diplomacy.

Shah Abbas’s military accomplishments included consolidating a fragmented Persian kingdom and defending it against encroaching neighbors. The king also bolstered his country’s economy by intensifying trade between Persia and Europe, whose leaders he viewed as natural allies against his enemies, the Ottoman Turks. Abbas developed close ties with England’s East India Company by giving them special trade privileges and exchanging silk for English broadcloth. He also sent a large shipment of fine silk to King Philip of Spain and Portugal in an attempt to persuade him to give up the strategic island of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, which the Portuguese had captured from the Persians nearly a century earlier. (This mission failed so completely that the Safavid ambassador to King Philip's court was executed when he returned home to Persia.) Not only silk yarn and cloth but luxury carpets also often made their way onto merchant ships and into diplomatic pouches.

Polonaise detail

Some of the finest carpets to come out of Isfahan’s royal workshops belong to a group that scholars today classify as “Polonaise.” The name, a French word meaning “Polish,” is a bit misguided, based on a misunderstanding (more about that in a bit), but Abbas spared no expense in commissioning these unique carpets to dazzle trade partners both at home and abroad. The carpets were made of silk in bold, vibrant colors and often had brocaded areas fashioned from threads wrapped in real gold or silver. Although the foundations were usually cotton to lend the structure durability, separate silk fringes would be sewn onto the ends, giving the appearance that the entire rug was made of the more costly material.

Polonaise weavers used motifs that are still recognizable in modern Persian carpets, with medallions in the center, twisting vines along the borders, and floral designs against contrasting fields that look like someone scattered a flower bouquet across a pool of calm water. Other Polonaise designs were more typically European, often incorporating emblems associated with Western royalty, which has led scholars to believe that they were commissioned and made to the customer’s specifications.

Polonaise carpet with the
Polish royal crest
(Residenz Museum, Munich)

But these Western influences also created the misunderstanding over the name “Polonaise.” Over several centuries, the carpets’ origins were forgotten, as many didn’t survive the ravages of time. When two antique rugs owned by Poland’s Prince Czartoryski appeared in a Paris exhibition in 1878, they were labeled as tapis polonaise (Polish carpets). This source was supported by the fact that their motifs and materials were not seen as being typically Persian. And these particular rugs featured the coat of arms of a noble Polish family worked right into the design.

Although some historians questioned the carpets’ European roots right from the start, many prominent textile experts persisted in attributing them to Polish carpet factories well into the 20^th century. But contemporary accounts show that Sigismund Vasa III of Poland commissioned eight carpets in 1601, and two years later Shah Abbas sent another to Marino Grimani, the Doge of Venice, as a diplomatic gift. Today, nearly everyone agrees that most Polonaise carpets were woven in royal Safavid workshops in the Persian rug weaving centers of Isfahan, Yazd, and Kashan from the time of Shah Abbas’s Golden Age right up until a devastating Afghan invasion put an end to Safavid rule in 1722. And yet the Polish-inspired name has stuck.

Polonaise carpets today are rare, with only around 300 of them known to exist. Some of these rugs belong to prominent museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Residenz Museum in Munich, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Three of the photos I've featured on this page are of a Polonaise carpet I saw in the Iranian Carpet Museum in Tehran. At the time, I was writing my first mystery novel, which centered around the theft of a rare Safavid carpet. I took so many pictures of the Polonaise that I’m sure the guard suspected me of planning a forgery.

Border detail

The surviving Polonaise carpets leave only a hint of their former glory. Many have been worn down to the foundation, making them look more like loosely woven fabric than knotted pile rugs. The once vivid colors have faded to pastels (these dyes apparently adhere better to wool than to silk), and often the gold and silver brocade is either missing or tarnished. But you can still make out the lovely designs and with a bit of imagination reconstruct the vibrant colors in your mind. These carpets are prized as highly today as they were 500 years ago, with some commanding six-figure prices at auction.

Before we climb back aboard our time machine for the return journey to the 21^st century, let’s take a side trip to the Shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf (present day Iraq), where we’ll slip off our shoes and sink our feet into the soft silk of another of Shah Abbas’s precious commissions: a red and gold Polonaise that he presented to the shrine as a gift. Perhaps it was even another piece of diplomacy, since such a lovely carpet must have gone a long way toward unlocking the gates of heaven to its donor for his generosity. I hope so, anyway. Shah Abbas and his successors deserve a fine reward for giving the world such beautiful treasures.

Painting the Town—Tehran’s Street Art

By Heidi Noroozy

When I’m in Tehran, leaving the house without my camera would be as unthinkable as stepping onto the street without a scarf and manteau, the tunic every woman is required to wear for proper Islamic modesty. The city is filled with the most fascinating snippets of life, exotic to me if not to the locals, and I’d hate to miss an opportunity to capture them.

On my most recent visit to Iran last spring, I sometimes abandoned my usual dynamic subjects of daily life in favor of the city’s painted walls. Murals are everywhere in Tehran, alongside highways, on public buildings, tucked away in hidden alleys. Some carry political or religious messages while others are simply pretty works of art. Many are serious, a few whimsical. But all add color to a city that is often gray and drab.

Let me take you on a quick tour of my favorites (so far). We’ll begin at the edge of Sayeh Park, a green space in the heart of Tehran’s Shemiran district, just blocks away from my in-laws’ home. I love to walk here, and any excursion means checking out the murals along Vali Asr Avenue. The most delightful work of art is this house, which is painted to look like…well…a house, complete with windows, doors, and even flowers in bloom:

Here’s a detail of a painted-on window box filled with spring flowers.

Whenever I pass this charming house, I half expect a hobbit to emerge, tip his hat, then invite me in for tea, quite forgetting I’m in the Islamic Republic and not Middle Earth.

Farther down, across the street from Book City, my eye is drawn to a lovely painting that stretches all the way up a wall.

The first time I saw it, from a distance, the bright colors and geometric shapes captured my attention, and it took me a moment to realize the people were moving. I’d thought they were part of the two-dimensional scene. In fact, the artwork decorates the side of a staircase that leads from Vali Asr Avenue to a street higher up on the hill.

Nearby, on the same side of the road, this piece of modern art stretches nearly an entire block. It’s not actually a mural but a mosaic, the motif created from thousands of colored tiles.

In Tehran, I always spent a great deal of time sitting in traffic on clogged roads and highways, an inevitable aspect of any trip to this sprawling city. On my recent visit, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before: a lovely mural along the southbound lane of the Modares Highway. Now that a long stretch of Vali Asr Avenue is one-way northbound, this highway is the most direct way to reach my in-laws’ house from my favorite bazaar in Tajrish.

I like to think this mural was set in place to give people something pretty to look at while sitting impatiently in the inevitable traffic jams.

                

Another roadside painting occupies the entire side of a skyscraper:

We passed this building early one evening as dusk was falling, and the bright red spots are reflections of taillights traveling along the road. The patterns decorating the hands caught my attention, and I first thought they looked like the henna designs that traditionally adorn the hands of Indian women. But on closer inspection, I realized they are formed by calligraphy, miniature versions of the larger writing in the image’s center. The messages written here tell the story of Imam Hossein, the 7th-century Shia leader who was beheaded and martyred in Karbala (in present-day Iraq) during a battle between Shia and Sunni Muslim armies.

Occasionally, I’ve found murals in the most unexpected of places, like this one that literally adds a ray of (painted) sunshine to its neighborhood.

The charming scene decorates the side of a school at the end of a narrow alley off Jomhouri Eslami Street, right across from the red brick complex that houses the British Embassy (closed since 2011). Birds are a common element in these kinds of murals, and the two girls are wearing a typical school uniform—a long tunic worn over pants and a contrasting hood called a magna’eh.

Each time I return to Tehran, it seems that more of these colorful paintings have sprung up since my previous trip. So you can be sure that on my next visit—maybe this year, maybe next—I’ll be wandering about, camera in hand, eyes peeled for more lovely street art.