IRAN: When the old city fades away

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It is said that to make a costume drama in London — say a feature film based on a Charles Dickens novel — filmmakers need only cordon off traffic from any given street and begin shooting.

But in Tehran, where everybody delivers long-winded speeches about Iran’s heritage and grand cultural past and issues slogans about fending off the encroachments of the West, you can get lost in your own city because the architecture, street names and landmarks change so fast.

The disorientation has struck me and many of my friends, watching as old buildings are demolished and new high-rises spiral ever upward. Part of the rapid change is because of safety. On the radio they say 700,000 housing units in Tehran are in danger of collapse if a minor earthquake jolts the seismically active capital.

The World Bank provides loans for demolishing derelict houses and erecting apartment buildings or creating parks. But who will rebuild our ravaged memories?

When an Iranian poet based in the U.S. returned to Tehran for his father’s funeral, he coined the term ‘cultural Alzheimer’s disease’ to describe the phenomenon.

When I walk the old sections of the downtown, near the spacious embassies of Russia, Britain, Italy and France, I find myself constantly staring up in confusion, as if I were a blind man. I have to look past the first floor of the buildings just to figure out where I am. The ground floors of the old buildings have been turned into gleaming home appliance stores selling sleek Asian cellphones and refrigerators, or into seductive window displays of colorful men’s and women’s clothing.

It’s beyond the ground floors that you see dilapidated brick facades falling apart, old wooden staircases. I peek furtively through a crack of a surviving wooden gate or apertures in a leaning wall.

I catch sight of an untended fig, pine or Cypress tree on a piece of property that hasn’t yet been uprooted by contractors, or sold at an exorbitant price to a developer who rents out commercial space to computer or furniture retailers for $300 a square foot.

I wonder if I survive all calamities of the future and get to the age 80, what sort of Tehran I will roam with my walking stick.

--Ramin Mostaghim in Tehran