The ticket for the London-Paris segment of the journey cost £15
The ticket for the London-Paris segment of the journey cost £15. When the poet Omar Khayyam wrote, “a loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou”, he was probably dreaming about a jug of Shiraz. Sadly, although Shiraz, that dark peppery red, is popular worldwide, you won’t find any Shiraz in Shiraz today. Or anywhere else in the strictly teetotal Islamic Republic of Iran.
Fortunately I had sampled some Shiraz Shiraz way back on my first visit, in the back of a VW Kombi van at a campsite in Isfahan.Iran’s favourite wine may be off the list, but Omar Khayyam was never Iran’s favourite poet in the first place. His popularity in the West – all that “moving finger moving on” verse – is in part due to Edward FitzGerald, who put a lot of effort into translating and promoting him. Back home, his reputation rests on his mastery of mathematics rather than his prowess with prose.Saidi and Hafez, both of whom are buried in Shiraz, are the big names in a country where poetry is still important. Hafez’s tomb stands in a beautiful garden and features a popular tea house where you can sit around, puff on a qalyan (water pipe), sip chay (tea) and quote the master Much of life takes place around a teapot. I trace my 30-year love-affair with the drink straight back to my first visit to Turkey and Iran in the 1970s. Tea had always been a stewed, milked and sugared affair until I discovered it could come in tiny glasses and, while sugar was on offer, it wasn’t essential.Shiraz has a fine old fort, some interesting mosques and mausoleums and the Bagh-e Eram (“Garden of Paradise”). But the real attraction is 30 miles away, where the ancient ruins of Persepolis perch on a plateau below a cliff face.
Darius I (the Great) started building his showpiece city in 512 BC. Its glory days ended in 330BC when Alexander the Great invaded Persia, sacked the city and burnt it down.Historians are uncertain whether the demolition of Persepolis was the unfortunate result of a drunken party that got out of hand, or deliberate revenge for the destruction of Athens 150 years earlier by Xerxes, Darius I’s successor. Today things move faster: it took less than two years from the attack on the Twin Towers to the trashing of Baghdad. Alexander may have been slower in exacting revenge, but he was also somewhat more organised than the modern-day invaders of the Middle East. He cleared Persepolis before it was burnt – signs at the site note that emptying its treasury took 3,000 camels and mules to cart off the “12,000 talents” of silver. It’s the bas-reliefs that really tell the Persepolis story, and the impressive Apadana Stairway has the best of them.