In few other places is the gulf so wide between what is said and what is done
An Iranian couple sit together in the northwestern Shahran neighbourhood overlooking Tehran. Photograph: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images
Of the great cities of the Earth, Tehran is by no means the most engaging. An old citadel and a few villages when it became the capital of the Qajar kings in the 1790s, famed for the purity of its water and handsome oriental plane trees, Tehran broke out of its bounds in the 19th century and exploded in the 20th.
Asphalted and concreted by the first Pahlavi Shah, Reza (who ruled from 1925 to 1941), swelled by rural migrants during the famine years of the second world war and the oil boom that began in the mid-1950s, the city has galloped up the slopes of the Elburz mountains and across the scalding desert to the south. Bursting with automobiles, poisoned with smog and opium, shaken by earthquakes and almost permanent insurrection, a city of 3 million people in 1970 now holds about 12 million. It requires effort to find in this place the vestiges of a great civilisation and the shreds of the old Iranian amenity or douceur de vivre.
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Asphalted and concreted by the first Pahlavi Shah, Reza (who ruled from 1925 to 1941), swelled by rural migrants during the famine years of the second world war and the oil boom that began in the mid-1950s, the city has galloped up the slopes of the Elburz mountains and across the scalding desert to the south. Bursting with automobiles, poisoned with smog and opium, shaken by earthquakes and almost permanent insurrection, a city of 3 million people in 1970 now holds about 12 million. It requires effort to find in this place the vestiges of a great civilisation and the shreds of the old Iranian amenity or douceur de vivre.More
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