Train - Zig-Zag in Iran
120 images Created 1 Feb 2021
Hopping on sleeper trains across the length of Iran, mixing it with late night check-in at guesthouses and daily invitations by random strangers into their homes.
The construction of this railway line was once the prestige project of the Shah of Persia.
Taking it slow, a journey for retired men, students, itinerary traders, pilgrims, farmers and businessmen etc.
Musing on my Train travels from my friend Paul Salopek: "Caravans from al-Sham or al-Misr to Mecca—back in the camel days—took up to a year and contained as many as 10,000 people on 6000 animals. They stretched for kilometers. A guy at the front would fire a canon in the mornings to announce the departure of the vanguard. It was the dim announcement to the rest of the train to prepare for leaving. The caravans contained mobile shops, blacksmiths, clinics, schools, and everyone from slaves to queens. They were traveling towns. But towns with a clear and linear purpose: to travel. There was a shared destination, a common horizon. The effect of this combination—the cohesion of a community with the shared mission of moving—made such columns of travellers simultaneously tight-knit and dispersed. Ying and yang. A balance. Such voyagers were known as rahalla—a word that is deeper than the English “pilgrim” because it suggests a way of being that should be permanentIt, yet is ephemeral. Rahalla had privileges. Those not moving accommodated them.
This is the faint, echoed feeling that perhaps you are tapping into on modern trains; a deeper collective memory that in fact may go back all the way to the very beginning, to moving across the land in hunting bands, a primordial groove of collective movement that was at some level neurological and sacramental—united by purpose, yet fluid."
Shot for National Geographic (unpublished)
The construction of this railway line was once the prestige project of the Shah of Persia.
Taking it slow, a journey for retired men, students, itinerary traders, pilgrims, farmers and businessmen etc.
Musing on my Train travels from my friend Paul Salopek: "Caravans from al-Sham or al-Misr to Mecca—back in the camel days—took up to a year and contained as many as 10,000 people on 6000 animals. They stretched for kilometers. A guy at the front would fire a canon in the mornings to announce the departure of the vanguard. It was the dim announcement to the rest of the train to prepare for leaving. The caravans contained mobile shops, blacksmiths, clinics, schools, and everyone from slaves to queens. They were traveling towns. But towns with a clear and linear purpose: to travel. There was a shared destination, a common horizon. The effect of this combination—the cohesion of a community with the shared mission of moving—made such columns of travellers simultaneously tight-knit and dispersed. Ying and yang. A balance. Such voyagers were known as rahalla—a word that is deeper than the English “pilgrim” because it suggests a way of being that should be permanentIt, yet is ephemeral. Rahalla had privileges. Those not moving accommodated them.
This is the faint, echoed feeling that perhaps you are tapping into on modern trains; a deeper collective memory that in fact may go back all the way to the very beginning, to moving across the land in hunting bands, a primordial groove of collective movement that was at some level neurological and sacramental—united by purpose, yet fluid."
Shot for National Geographic (unpublished)
