Nostalgia

In a century, Iran has developed astonishingly. A traditional country with little industrialization at the beginning of the 20th century, it underwent rapid modernization under the Pahlavi dynasty (1925-1979), and which continued, by other means, under the Islamic Republic (1979-…). The old cities, from the 1930s onward, were for the most part completely remodeled to adapt to cars and the industrialization of the country.

In a few decades, multiple nostalgias were born for places that disappeared in these upheavals: Tehran of yesteryear or secret gardens, witnesses of a past life or happy moments, vestiges of ancient Iran for those nostalgic for Persian grandeur. If certain places have a resonance for Iranians especially, there is also a Western nostalgia for Persia: wonder for a mysterious Orient, recorded by European travelers since the Middle Ages; a nostalgia, too, for an art of travel, a “way of the world” (Nicolas Bouvier), prior to tourist standardization.

If we like to make you experience contemporary Iran, we also like to dream of history, of other ways of crossing the world, of a certain Persia which has inhabited Western culture and its nostalgia for oriental paradises for so long.