It was busy in Isfahan, and this was due to a celebration. The so-called Twelver branch of Shiah Islam believe in the Twelve Imams, the spiritual and political successors of the prophet Muhammad. They were celebrating the first successor that Muhammad appointed hundreds and hundreds of years ago, Ali. And when I say celebrate, I mean they drank more tea.

The twelfth of the twelve imams is missing. Nobody knows what happened to him, he’s turned into some ethereal ghost and Shia muslims eagerly await his return so that everything will change. It is eerily similar to the Jesus and the rapture story. Khomeini, of course, became the thirteenth imam.

Isfahan itself is a gorgeous city and the most easily liked of the Iranian cities I went to. The streets are wide and there’s green everywhere. The people too seem to be more friendly and chipper than they are elsewhere, though in general you will find warmth and friendliness from Iranians all over this country.

In the center of Isafahan lies the Nagsh-e Jahan square, one of the biggest squares in the world right after Tianaman Square in China and the Red Square in Russia. It would be easy to joke about regimes loving their squares but this one was built by Shah Abbas and it’s construction started back in 1598 after he made Isfahan the capital of the Persian empire.

Shah Abbas had a dream and he managed to realize it for the most part. The square would hold the largest mosque at the time, the biggest bazaar and his own palace. By bringing them all together in one place he effectively centralized all the power-structures of the Persian empire in one place, bringing an end to Persia’s decentralized power-structures it had before. Abbas turned Isfahan into a metropolitan city and in it housed people from all over the world, including Turks, Georgians, Armenians, Indians, Chinese and a growing number of Europeans. It makes it easy to understand the Persian proverb “Esfahān nesf-e jahān ast” (Isfahan is half the world).

Wondering this magnificent square today one can easily imagine how much greater it must have been more than four hundred years ago, something truly splendid for its time, especially given Isfahan’s barren surroundings. Today though, the face of Khomeini is pictured on several of the historical buildings and non-Persian visitors were few, a stark reminder of how what was once half the world has become a dream long lost in an isolated country.

Hello, my name is Majid.
I study agriculture.
What is your name and where are you from?
What is your profession?

I read the words once more and looked back at the small man. I started answering his questions but he quickly shook his head and simply pointed at the note again while handing me a pen. He wanted me to write down the answers and I wondered if he might be deaf. I wrote my answers down and handed the note back to him. He smiled, the bus driver honked his horn to tell us it was time to go again and Majid instantly turned around. So much for the deaf theory.

Once back on the bus it turned out the small Majid had a small bag with a big dictionary inside. He carefully deciphered my reply and soon handed me another note, causing another passenger to ask what was up with all the love letters passing back and forth.

Majid wrote that he liked my home country because it was best in agriculture. I guess you learn something new every day. As he requests, I give him my e-mail address so we can stay in touch, which he does. He sent me multiple e-mails asking me if everything was ok, if I needed a guide and he wrote that if I ran into any trouble I should contact him. Majid, like many Iranians, turned out to have a big heart for such a small man.

In Ramsar I meet a man who speaks English rather well and would like to have a talk. We go and grab some dinner together. He turns up the television in the small restaurant and glances back over his shoulder at the entrance and windows a lot. He seems quite paranoid but rather quickly informs me that he’s been arrested before. He’s not being paranoid he explains, they really were after him.

In 2009, during the Green Revolution that took place after the elections, he had taken photographs which he had uploaded to the internet. He had done this from an internet cafe where he had to show his ID to get access to a computer. This had allowed the government to track him down and arrest him. It took many months before they finally did though. When asked why it took them so long he answers that he travels around a lot. So why didn’t they just wait for him at his house? That, he explains, is not the way it works.

I had always imagined the arrests of dissidents to be a big dramatic show, something that would wake up the entire neighborhood while the dissidents would be dragged down the street by their hair. He explains that in reality, it is quite the opposite. Waiting at his house would mean other people would see him get arrested. And if other people saw him get arrested, they might just realize that they lived in a country where these kinds of things happen. Keeping the arrests quiet seems to be the preferred method of the secret police.

I told him that spending months on his arrest seemed an awful lot of trouble to go through for uploading just five photos and he explains that there were $100 rewards for any arrests related to the demonstrations. That is quite a bit of money for a country where the average salary is $500 a month.

It wasn’t the first time he got arrested though. The authorities had also caught him with DVDs of 24, the Fox television series. A friend bailed him out for $100, though it sounded more like it had been a bribe than an actual bail payment. When asked what he’s planning on doing next he says he’s not waiting around for any more demonstrations. He wants out. He’s heard good things about Romania. There was just one small problem, he was on probation and couldn’t leave the country. If he would get arrested again, he would be jailed for life. I wished him the best of luck. After dinner I decided to pick a new destination in this vast country. I was meeting so many would-be and had-been revolutionaries in this province it was time to move on.

What makes Masouleh an interesting destination is the rather unique construction of the town. Built against the mountain slopes the roof of one house functions as the street in front of the other. Practically any street you walk on in this village is built upon the roofs of the houses below it. The town center had a couple of tea houses, a couple that was relaxing on a big pile of pillows waved.

The man, like many in Iran, was an engineer, his wife a teacher. They met during one of her classes. The man doesn’t waste much time. After offering some fresh fruits and candies along with tea, he starts to talk. A lot. He tells me the Iranian government are a bunch of donkeys. And the Iranian people? Well they’re almost even worse. They get distracted by small things you see, instead of focussing on the bigger picture. According to him, they’re always bickering over simple things: To whom belongs this chicken? To whom belongs this egg? Nobody ever seems to care about whom owns the damn henhouse. His wife tries to calm her husband down a little. “There there dear, it’s talk like this that’s already got you arrested more than once,” she says as she soothingly strokes his arm. He points at my camera and concludes by saying he thinks I am a reporter. He tells me that once I get home, I should go and report about our conversation.

The UN isn’t happy about these sanctions at all, its chief Ban Ki-moon has criticized them for punishing Iranian citizens by making much needed medicines inaccessible and raising the price of every day life to a point where it becomes a struggle just to survive for a large part of its population. The sanctions against Iran are very similar to those put in place against Iraq, even though the US and Europe keep referring to them as being “smart” and “targeted”. The sanctions against Iraq in the nineties are thought to be responsible for the death of at least half a million children.

I discussed the effect of the sanctions with the owner of a pizza restaurant in Tehran and asked him if the sanctions were interfering with his daily life or if they were mainly making it harder to get luxury products. He said the luxury products were becoming really unaffordable quite fast due to the collapse of the Iranian Rial currency but also that the price of the cheese he uses on his pizza has more than doubled the past year, as have many other dairy and food products. “When prices double or even triple on so many things and salaries only increase 10%, this becomes a problem.” I asked him what his thoughts were about all this and he shrugged. “At least it’s better than getting bombed like Iraq.”

Decades before Kermit Roosevelt arrived in the basement of that building, the British arrived in Iran. In 1908 they discovered Iran’s lush oil fields and struck a deal with the Shah (king) of Iran to start drilling it up. In return, Iran got a lousy 16% of the profits of the newly founded Anglo-Persian Oil Company, later known as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and known today as British Petroleum or BP. The conditions for the Iranian workers were bad and from the 40 million pounds of profit made in 1947, Iran only received 7 million. As the years passed, Iran began to realize what a bad deal they had struck. In 1950, Iran learned that the Arab-American Oil Company in Saudi Arabia worked on a 50-50% basis and made a similar proposal to the British, but the UK foreign office refused to sign any such deal.

Their demands falling on deaf ears, the Iranians decided to take control of their own national resources and voted to nationalize their oil fields in the early 1950s. The British didn’t like it and wanted to take back control of what they considered ‘their’ oil. They approached the US administration, led by Truman, and tried to convince him to help overthrow the then prime minister Mossadegh so they could install a new one with the help of the Iranian Shah. Truman wasn’t interested. Fortunately for the British, Eisenhower soon took office and after playing on the US fear of a communist controlled Middle East, he agreed to help the British overthrow the government of Iran so they could control Iran’s oil fields once more. It was one of the first times the United States’ CIA got involved in overthrowing another country’s government, but certainly not the last.

Kermit Roosevelt, from the basement of the US embassy, masterminded the coup that got rid of Mossadegh, made the Iranian Shah appoint a new prime minister that the UK and US had selected and hired thugs and gangsters to squelch any resistance on the streets. The Shah, heavily backed by the US used the money from a new oil deal and lifted sanctions to try to Westernize Iran rapidly. Opponents viewed him as a puppet of the West and conservatives didn’t approve of the new Western ways he tried to make people live by. The less popular the royal family became, the more he turned into a brutal and violent dictator which eventually led to the 1979 revolution, joining both secularists and religious conservatives in their struggle to get rid of the tyrant. The secularists were not amused when Khomeini returned and simply took control of the country as its new divine leader. The idea of democracy was too Western for his liking, and that was just one of the first disappointments for the secular and leftist activists that had helped getting rid of the Shah.

Meanwhile during the revolution, the Shah, dying of cancer, had fled to the US to seek treatment. The Iranians demanded him back, wanting him to face trial and execution in Iran and stormed the U.S. embassy where they took 52 American diplomats as hostages for 444 days. The memories of how 26 years earlier the Shah had fled and the CIA and MI6 had staged a coup still fresh in their minds, they feared history might repeat itself and saw something happen that seemed all too familiar.

Although the embassy building still stands, the US and Iran haven’t had embassies since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. It now houses the revolutionary guard, the American seal near the entrance is defaced and the walls around the compound are covered in murals depicting the Statue of Liberty with a skull as a face and showing the flag of Israel flying on top of the White House. When going up the stairs from the subway station, the wall that greets you simply states “Down with USA”. Learning about the history between the two countries, it isn’t hard to see where the sentiment comes from.

When a baby passes away, it does not get the regular elaborate funeral ceremony the Torajans normally hold. Instead, the naked body of the baby is placed inside a hole in a tree after which the hole is covered with palm tree fibers.

The tree used for this is the latex tree, and it is chosen for a very specific reason. The latex in the tree is considered milk for the baby and, over time, the hole in which the baby has been placed will grow shut, thus returning it to the ‘womb’. As the tree grows higher and higher, it will carry the spirit of the baby up to the heavens.

However beautiful the tradition and the tree are, I was glad to hear that thanks to the free immunization provided for newborns by UNICEF, infant mortality has dropped dramatically and the tree has not been in use for a long time.