Iran
The ancient land of Persia, one of the world's oldest civilizations, a proud, hospitable, deeply poetic people of Shia Islam and Persian heritage, of Nowruz and Yalda, of taarof and tea, of carpets and saffron rice. The complete guide.
Iran is a large country in western Asia, the heart of the ancient land long known to the world as Persia, home to about ninety million people and one of the oldest continuous civilizations on earth. It is a high, mountainous, mostly arid land between the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf, and its people are overwhelmingly Shia Muslim, with Persian, or Farsi, as the national language, alongside many other peoples and tongues. Iranians carry a deep pride in their Persian heritage, distinct from the Arab world around them, reaching back to Cyrus the Great and the empires of antiquity, and they are known for their reverence for poetry, their elaborate courtesy called taarof, their legendary hospitality, their carpets and arts, and their love of festivals such as Nowruz, the Persian New Year. Since 1979 the country has been an Islamic Republic, and in early 2026 it passed through a grave war. This guide walks through the land, the ancient identity, the poets, the faith, the festivals, the food, and the customs in turn.
Overview
Iran is a large country in western Asia, bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan to the north, by Afghanistan and Pakistan to the east, by the Caspian Sea to the north, and by the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman to the south. It is the second-largest country of the Middle East, a high and mostly dry land of mountains, deserts, and plateau, home to about ninety million people, most of them living in the cities, above all the vast capital, Tehran, and the historic centres of Isfahan, Shiraz, Mashhad, and Tabriz.
Iran is, since the revolution of 1979, an Islamic Republic, in which a Supreme Leader, the highest religious and political authority, stands above an elected president and parliament. The present Supreme Leader is Mojtaba Khamenei, named in March 2026 after the death of his father, Ali Khamenei, and the president is Masoud Pezeshkian. The great majority of Iranians are Shia Muslims, and Iran is the only country in the world where Shia Islam is the state religion. The national language is Persian, called Farsi, an ancient Indo-European tongue, written in the Arabic script, and the country is home as well to many other peoples and languages.
A few deep forces shape life in Iran. There is the ancient land of Persia and its proud, distinct identity, older than Islam. There is the love of poetry, which runs through the whole culture. There is Shia Islam and the mourning of Karbala. There is the cycle of festivals, above all Nowruz. There is the elaborate courtesy of taarof and the depth of hospitality. And there is the rich heritage of carpets, arts, food, and family. The sections that follow trace these and walk through the customs, ending with the difficult present.
The land of mountain and desert
Iran is a land of high mountains, vast deserts, and a great central plateau, mostly dry and rugged, ringed and crossed by mountain ranges that shape its climate and life. In the north, the Alborz mountains rise in a wall along the Caspian Sea, crowned by the snow-capped volcano of Mount Damavand, at over five thousand metres the highest peak in the whole Middle East and a symbol in Persian myth. Down the western side runs the long chain of the Zagros mountains, and between and beyond the ranges lie the high, arid interior and two of the most forbidding deserts on earth, the great salt and sand wastes of the central plateau.
This geography gives Iran sharp contrasts. Along the narrow Caspian coast in the north lies a green, humid, rainy strip of forest, rice paddies, and tea gardens, utterly unlike the rest of the country. The high plateau bakes in summer and freezes in winter, and the old cities of the interior were built around the careful gathering of scarce water, with underground channels, wind towers to catch the breeze, and walled gardens of shade and running water that became the Persian image of paradise. In the far south, the coast of the Persian Gulf is hot and humid, a world of palms, pearls, and trade.
The people gathered where water allowed, in the great oasis cities strung across the plateau and along the mountain feet, each an ancient centre of trade and culture. Tehran, the sprawling modern capital, sits against the Alborz; Isfahan, with its blue-tiled mosques and bridges, lies at the centre; Shiraz, the city of poets and gardens, lies in the south; Mashhad, in the northeast, holds Shia Islam's holiest Iranian shrine; and Tabriz anchors the northwest. The land of mountain, desert, and oasis has shaped Persian life for thousands of years.
Persia, not Arabia
The deepest fact of Iranian identity is that Iran is Persia, an ancient civilization with its own language, history, and character, distinct from the Arab world that surrounds it, and Iranians hold this distinction with great pride. The Persians are not Arabs; they are an Indo-European people, kin in language to the peoples of Europe and India, and their tongue, Persian, is wholly different from Arabic. Their civilization is one of the oldest on earth, reaching back more than two and a half thousand years, and they see themselves as heirs to a glory far older than Islam.
That glory begins with the ancient Persian empires. In the sixth century before the common era, Cyrus the Great founded the Achaemenid Empire, the largest the world had yet seen, stretching from Egypt to India, and built the great ceremonial capital of Persepolis, whose ruins still awe visitors today. Cyrus is remembered for a famous clay document, the Cyrus Cylinder, often called one of the earliest charters of human rights for its words on tolerance, and Iranians revere him as the founder of their nation. After the Achaemenids fell to Alexander the Great, later Persian dynasties, the Parthians and the Sassanids, restored Persian power and culture for a thousand years more.
Then, in the seventh century, Arab armies carrying the new faith of Islam conquered Persia, and the Iranians, over time, became Muslims. But unlike many lands the Arabs conquered, Persia did not lose itself; it kept its own language and its sense of identity, and within a few centuries it shaped a brilliant Islamic-Persian culture that led the wider Muslim world in poetry, science, and art. The old faith before Islam was Zoroastrianism, one of the world's oldest religions, with its sacred fire and its vision of the struggle between light and dark, and its echoes still run through Persian festivals and thought. To this day, Iranians hold their Persian heritage, older and distinct, at the centre of who they are.
The poets
Poetry is the heartbeat of Persian culture, loved and lived to a degree found in few other places on earth, woven into daily speech, recited at gatherings, learned by heart, and revered as the highest of the arts. The great classical poets are not distant figures studied in school but living presences, quoted in conversation, consulted for wisdom, and visited at their tombs as one might visit a saint. Ordinary Iranians can recite verses of Hafez or Saadi from memory, and a well-turned line of poetry carries deep authority.
Iran's great poets stand among the giants of world literature. Ferdowsi, a thousand years ago, wrote the Shahnameh, the Book of Kings, the vast epic of Persia's mythical and ancient history, which helped save the Persian language and remains a national treasure. Rumi, known to Iranians as Mowlana, poured the longings of the soul for the divine into verses of Sufi mysticism that are now beloved around the whole world. Hafez of Shiraz, perhaps the most cherished of all, wrote luminous, layered poems of love, wine, and the divine that Iranians keep at home beside the holy book and open at random for guidance. Saadi, also of Shiraz, gave the language its store of moral wisdom, and Omar Khayyam wrote the famous quatrains on fate, time, and the fleeting sweetness of life.
Bound up with the poets is the deep current of Sufism, the mystical strand of Islam that seeks union with the divine through love, and whose spirit fills so much Persian poetry, music, and thought. This love of poetry is not a thing of the past but a living part of Iranian life: the tombs of Hafez and Saadi in Shiraz are gardens full of visitors, families gather to read poems on winter nights, and the verses of the old masters give Iranians a shared language of beauty, longing, and wisdom that binds the culture across the centuries.
Shia Islam and the Republic
The great majority of Iranians, around nine in ten, are Shia Muslims, and Iran is the only nation in the world where Shia Islam is the official state religion, a fact that shapes the country's identity, calendar, and public life. The Shia branch of Islam, which split from the Sunni majority over who should lead the Muslims after the Prophet Muhammad, holds that leadership belonged to the Prophet's family, beginning with his cousin and son-in-law Ali and passing through a line of twelve revered Imams, the last of whom is believed to be hidden and awaited. Iran became firmly Shia after the Safavid dynasty made it the state religion in the year 1501, one of the great turning points of its history.
The holy cities of Qom and Mashhad are centres of Shia learning and pilgrimage; Mashhad holds the golden shrine of Imam Reza, the eighth Imam and the only one buried in Iran, drawing millions of pilgrims. The faith orders the rhythm of life, from daily prayer and the fast of Ramadan to the great festivals and the deep observance of mourning. A senior class of clergy, the ayatollahs and mullahs, hold great religious authority, trained in the seminaries of Qom and elsewhere.
Since the revolution of 1979, which overthrew the monarchy under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran has been an Islamic Republic, a form of government found nowhere else, in which religious and political authority are joined. Above the elected president and parliament stands the Supreme Leader, a senior cleric who holds the highest power in the land, guiding the state according to a doctrine of rule by the religious jurist. This joining of mosque and state has shaped every part of Iranian public life since 1979, governing law, dress, education, and culture, and it remains the defining and most contested feature of the modern Iranian state.
The mourning of Karbala
At the emotional centre of Iranian Shia faith lies the memory of Karbala, the battle in the year 680 in which Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet, was killed along with his small band of followers by a far larger army, a martyrdom that Shia Muslims mourn with deep and public grief every year. The commemoration of Karbala runs through the whole of Persian culture, in poetry, music, and a solemn view of the world, and the sorrow of that day is felt as if it were fresh.
The mourning reaches its height in the holy month of Muharram, above all on its tenth day, Ashura, the anniversary of Hussein's death, when the country turns to grief. Cities and villages fill with mourning processions; people dress in black; men beat their chests in rhythmic lament; elegies and sermons retell the story of Karbala to weeping crowds; and in some places the events of that day are performed as a kind of passion play, the tazieh, the only true theatre tradition of the Shia world. The mood is one of profound communal sorrow and devotion.
Bound up with the mourning is a custom of great generosity, the giving of free food, the nazri, cooked in huge pots and handed out to all comers as an act of charity and of vows fulfilled, so that the days of mourning are also days of feeding the community. Forty days after Ashura comes another great day of remembrance, Arbaeen. Through these rites, the grief of Karbala binds Iranians together in shared devotion and reminds them of the Shia themes of sacrifice, justice, and standing against oppression that run deep in the culture.
Nowruz and the leap over fire
The greatest and most beloved celebration of the Iranian year is Nowruz, the Persian New Year, which falls on the first day of spring, at the exact moment of the equinox, and marks the rebirth of nature after winter. Nowruz is far older than Islam, with roots reaching back more than three thousand years into the Zoroastrian past, and it is kept by Iranians of every background as the warmest, happiest festival of all, a time of renewal, family, and joy, honoured by the wider world as a treasure of human heritage.
The customs of Nowruz are rich and ancient. In the weeks before, families clean their homes from top to bottom in the spring cleaning called khaneh tekani, and they lay out the haft-sin, a special table set with seven symbolic items whose names begin with the Persian letter S, each standing for a hope for the new year, such as health, love, and plenty, along with a mirror, candles, painted eggs, a goldfish, and often a book of poetry or scripture. At the moment the new year arrives, families gather at the table, and the holiday unfolds over nearly two weeks of visiting, in which the young call on their elders and gifts and sweets are exchanged.
The season has its own dramatic rites. On the eve of the last Wednesday of the old year comes Chaharshanbe Suri, the festival of fire, when people light bonfires in the streets and leap over the flames, calling on the fire to take away their winter pallor and give them its glow, in an echo of the old reverence for fire. And on the thirteenth day after the new year comes Sizdah Bedar, when the whole nation pours out into the countryside, parks, and gardens for a great day of picnicking in the open air, ending the holidays by returning to nature. Nowruz, with its fire, its haft-sin, and its weeks of family visiting, is the heart of the Iranian year.
The long night of Yalda
If Nowruz celebrates the return of spring, the other great old Persian festival marks the depth of winter, the night of Yalda, kept on the longest, darkest night of the year, the winter solstice in late December, when families gather to outlast the darkness together until the dawn. Like Nowruz, Yalda is an ancient celebration with Zoroastrian roots, marking the moment when the long nights begin to shorten and the light to return, and it remains one of the most cherished family occasions in Iran.
On Yalda night, families gather, often at the home of the eldest, to stay up late together, talking, snacking, and keeping one another company through the long night. The table is laid with foods of deep red, the colour of the dawn to come, above all watermelon and pomegranate, along with nuts, dried fruits, and sweets, all eaten in abundance. A beloved custom of the night is the reading of poetry, especially the verses of Hafez, opened at random so that the chosen poem may speak to the year ahead, a gentle kind of divination shared among the family.
Iran keeps other old seasonal festivals too, such as Mehregan, the ancient autumn festival of thanksgiving, though these are now less widely observed than Nowruz and Yalda. Together, the great festivals of the Persian calendar, rooted in the cycles of sun and season and far older than Islam, sit alongside the Islamic holy days to give the Iranian year its rich double rhythm, and they bind families and the nation in shared, ancient celebration of light, renewal, and togetherness.
Taarof, the art of courtesy
One of the most distinctive and famous features of Iranian social life is taarof, an elaborate code of ritual politeness and courtesy that governs how Iranians offer, refuse, and accept, and that can puzzle visitors until they learn its rhythm. At its heart, taarof is a graceful dance of insistence and refusal: when something is offered, whether food, a gift, or a favour, good manners require that it be politely declined, often more than once, before it is accepted, and the giver must insist warmly several times before the offer is taken up.
Taarof shows itself in countless daily ways. A host will press food on a guest again and again; a guest will at first refuse; the well-mannered way to accept is on the third offering. Famously, a shopkeeper or taxi driver may wave away payment, saying it is not worth anything, as a gesture of courtesy, and the customer must politely insist on paying. People urge one another to go first through a door with repeated and sincere insistence. Compliments are returned and deflected with grace, and self-effacement is prized over any hint of boasting.
Behind the ritual lies a genuine value: taarof expresses respect, humility, generosity, and the placing of the other person above oneself, and it smooths social life with warmth and grace. For a visitor, the keys are to recognise that a first refusal may be politeness rather than a true no, to insist warmly when offering, to decline gently at first when offered, and not to take everything at literal face value. Once understood, taarof reveals the deep courtesy and consideration that run through Iranian manners.
Tea and the welcome
Iranians are renowned for their hospitality, which is generous, warm, and central to the culture, so that a guest in an Iranian home is treated as a blessing and showered with food, attention, and care far beyond what a visitor might expect. To host well is a deep point of honour, and Iranians will go to great lengths, and considerable expense, to welcome a guest, pressing food and tea upon them and resisting any attempt to help or to repay. The welcome of an Iranian household is one of the most cherished experiences of travel in the country.
At the centre of this hospitality is tea, the chai that is drunk all day, every day, throughout Iran, and offered to every guest the moment they arrive. Persian tea is brewed strong and dark and served hot in small glasses, often taken by holding a sugar cube or a piece of crystallised rock sugar between the teeth and drinking the tea through it, and it is accompanied by dates, sweets, pastries, fresh fruit, and nuts. The offering and sharing of tea is the constant ritual of Iranian social life, a sign of welcome, friendship, and respect.
An Iranian meal with guests is an act of abundance, the table heaped with far more food than can be eaten, dish after dish pressed on the visitor with the insistence of taarof. To refuse such hospitality outright would give offence; to receive it graciously is to honour the host. This deep tradition of the open door and the laden table, of tea always ready and the guest always honoured, is one of the warmest and most defining features of Iranian life.
Rice, kebab, and the Persian table
Persian food is one of the world's great cuisines, subtle, fragrant, and refined, built on the balance of delicate flavours, the generous use of fresh herbs, and the slow cooking of stews, and it is a deep source of pride and pleasure in Iranian life. At the centre of the table stand two things held almost sacred: rice and bread. Persian rice, long-grained and cooked with great care, is the heart of the meal, and the most prized part of all is the tahdig, the crisp golden crust that forms at the bottom of the pot, fought over at every table.
The glory of Persian cooking is its stews, the khoresh, slow-simmered blends of meat, vegetables, herbs, and fruit served over rice. The most beloved of all, often called the national dish, is ghormeh sabzi, a deep green stew of herbs, beans, lamb, and dried lime, while fesenjan, a rich, dark sauce of ground walnuts and pomegranate served with chicken or duck, is a festive favourite. Alongside the stews come the famous kebabs, skewers of grilled meat, above all koobideh of minced lamb and jujeh of saffron chicken, served with rice or flatbread, grilled tomatoes, and fresh herbs.
Persian cooking is marked by its distinctive flavours: the gold of saffron, the perfume of rosewater, the tang of dried lime and barberries, the sweetness of pomegranate, and the constant freshness of herbs, eaten by the handful as a side dish. Yogurt, called mast, appears at every meal, plain or mixed with cucumber and mint; thick herb soups, the ash, warm the cold months; and a wealth of sweets, delicate, fragrant, and often scented with rose and saffron, accompany the ever-present tea. Alcohol is forbidden under the law of the Islamic Republic. The Persian table, generous and refined, is at the centre of family and hospitality.
The carpet and the Persian arts
Among the glories of Persian civilization, none is more famous than the carpet, for the Persian carpet is regarded the world over as the finest of its kind, a work of art woven by hand over months or years, and Iran has long produced the great majority of the world's handmade carpets. Each region has its own patterns, colours, and knots, from the dense, intricate floral designs of the great workshops to the bold, geometric weavings of the tribes and villages, and a fine carpet is at once a household treasure, an heirloom, and a store of wealth, passed down through generations.
The carpet is only one of many Persian arts of extraordinary refinement. Persian miniature painting, with its jewel-like colour and exquisite detail, illustrated the great books of poetry and history with scenes of gardens, battles, and lovers. Persian calligraphy turned the written word into flowing art. And in tilework and architecture, Iran reached heights rarely matched, above all in the blue-tiled mosques, domes, and squares of Isfahan, the city so beautiful that Iranians once said it was half the world, with its vast central square, its soaring mosques, and its arched bridges.
Bound up with the architecture is the Persian garden, an ancient art of its own, the walled garden of shade trees, flowers, and running water that was the Persian image of paradise, and from which the very word paradise descends. Persian metalwork, ceramics, glass, and inlay are prized as well, and the music, with its plaintive scales and instruments such as the tar and the santur, carries the same refined, melancholy beauty. Together these arts, the carpet above all, express the deep Persian love of beauty, pattern, and craft.
The bazaar
The traditional heart of every Iranian city is the bazaar, the great covered marketplace, a vast warren of vaulted lanes, courtyards, and caravanserais where goods of every kind are bought and sold, and which has been for many centuries far more than a place of trade. The grand bazaars of cities such as Tabriz, Isfahan, and Tehran are among the oldest and largest covered markets in the world, and they remain busy, teeming places, fragrant with spices, bright with carpets and copperware, loud with bargaining.
The bazaar has always been a centre of social, religious, and political life as much as of commerce. Its merchants, the bazaaris, form an old and influential class, closely tied to the mosque and to the religious life of the city, and the bazaar has more than once been a force in Iran's history, its support or opposition mattering to those who would rule. Mosques, tea houses, and workshops are woven through the lanes, and to walk the bazaar is to feel the old rhythm of Iranian urban life.
Around the bazaar gathered other old institutions of the city. The tea house, the ghahve khaneh, was a place where men met to drink tea, smoke the water pipe, talk, and listen to storytellers recite the epic of the Shahnameh. The zourkhaneh, the house of strength, was a place of traditional athletics, where men performed ritual exercises with heavy clubs to the beat of a drum and the chanting of poetry, a tradition blending sport, music, and moral teaching. Though some of these old places have faded with modern life, the bazaar endures as the living, beating commercial heart of the Iranian city.
The family and the home
Family is the foundation of Iranian life, and the bonds of family are close, warm, and central, reaching well beyond parents and children to a wide web of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins who remain deeply involved in one another's lives. Loyalty to family comes before almost all else; family members support one another through life; and the extended family gathers often, for the festivals, for visits, and for the great meals that are the centre of Iranian social life. Respect for parents and especially for elders runs very deep, and the wishes of the old carry weight.
The home holds a special place in Iranian life, a private world set apart from the public sphere, where the family lives its real life and where guests are received with the full warmth of Persian hospitality. Iranians often draw a clear line between the careful, formal face shown in public and the relaxed, affectionate intimacy of family and close friends behind the door of the home. Within the home, shoes are removed, meals are shared on a cloth spread on the floor or at the table, and the rituals of tea and welcome unfold.
Traditional roles within the family have long been shaped by custom and by the law of the Islamic Republic, with defined expectations for men and women, though these are changing, especially in the cities, where women are highly educated and increasingly present in work and public life. Marriage is a major family event, often involving both families closely, and weddings are large, joyful, and elaborate. Through all the changes of modern life, the family remains the strongest bond in Iranian society, the source of identity, support, and belonging.
The many peoples
Though Persians form the largest group and Persian culture sets the national tone, Iran is in truth a land of many peoples, a patchwork of ethnic groups, languages, and traditions that have lived side by side for centuries, bound together by a shared Iranian identity and the unifying Persian language. Persians make up something over half the population, but alongside them live many other long-settled peoples, each with its own tongue, dress, music, and customs.
The largest minority are the Azeris, a Turkic-speaking people of the northwest around Tabriz, deeply woven into Iranian life and politics. In the western mountains live the Kurds, with their own language and strong identity, shared with kin across the borders; in the southwest, the Lurs and the Arabs of Khuzestan; in the southeast, the Baloch; in the northeast, the Turkmen; and across the land, smaller groups such as the Armenians and the nomadic Qashqai with their famous carpets. Persian remains the shared language that binds these peoples together, even as each keeps its mother tongue at home.
Iran is home as well to old religious minorities, recognised and protected under the law: Christians, above all the ancient Armenian and Assyrian communities; Jews, whose presence in Persia reaches back over two and a half thousand years to the time of Cyrus; and Zoroastrians, the keepers of the old pre-Islamic faith. A minority of Iranians, perhaps one in ten, are Sunni rather than Shia Muslims, mostly among the Kurds, Baloch, and Turkmen. The Baha'i faith, which arose in Iran, is not recognised, and its followers have faced severe difficulty. This deep variety of peoples and faiths is part of the long story of Persian civilization.
The veil and the young nation
Modern Iran is marked by a deep tension between a conservative religious state and a young, educated, and often restless society, and nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the rules of dress and the place of women. Since the revolution of 1979, the law of the Islamic Republic has required women to cover their hair and wear modest clothing in public, the compulsory headscarf becoming the most visible sign of the religious order, enforced over the decades with varying strictness.
This requirement has become a focus of conflict between the state and many of its people. In recent years, large protests have arisen over the dress laws and wider restrictions, most prominently in 2022 after the death in custody of a young woman detained over her headscarf, which set off nationwide demonstrations under the slogan calling for woman, life, and freedom, and again in further waves of unrest, including serious protests and a harsh crackdown in early 2026. These movements reflect deep frustrations, especially among the young and among women, over personal freedoms, the economy, and the direction of the country.
For Iran is a strikingly young and educated nation. Women attend university in great numbers, often outnumbering men, and a large share of the population is young, urban, and connected to the wider world through the internet and satellite television despite official limits. Many young Iranians, while proud of their country and their Persian heritage, chafe against the restrictions of the religious state and live a private life, behind the doors of the home, quite different from the public face required outside. This gap between a conservative state and a young, often secular-minded society is one of the central features of Iran today.
The nation today
Iran today is a nation of about ninety million people carrying an ancient and proud civilization through a time of grave difficulty. It remains an Islamic Republic, governed under a Supreme Leader, currently Mojtaba Khamenei, who took the office in March 2026 after the death of his father, Ali Khamenei, alongside an elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian, and parliament. For many years the country has lived under heavy international sanctions, tied above all to its disputed nuclear programme, which have weighed hard on the economy, driving high inflation and hardship even as Iran holds great wealth in oil and gas and a large, capable, and educated population.
In early 2026, Iran passed through the gravest crisis in the history of the Islamic Republic. A major war broke out at the end of February, in which the United States and Israel struck Iran heavily, killing the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, and many senior figures, and inflicting wide destruction and large-scale displacement, while Iran struck back across the region. After nearly four months of fighting, a ceasefire and a memorandum to end the war were reached in June 2026, opening a period of negotiation over Iran's nuclear programme and the lifting of sanctions. The religious government endured the war, with the new Supreme Leader and the powerful Revolutionary Guard remaining in control, though the country was left battered and its future uncertain. As this guide is written, the situation remains fragile and fast-changing.
Through all of this, the deeper Iran endures beneath the turmoil of the state. The ancient land of Persia, with its mountains, deserts, and gardens, still shapes the life of the people; the love of poetry, the courtesy of taarof, and the depth of hospitality still mark daily life; the festivals of Nowruz and Yalda still gather families across the generations; and the carpets, the cooking, and the arts still carry the refinement of a very old culture. The Iranian people, heirs to one of the world's great civilizations, carry their poetry, their faith, their hospitality, and their pride through a hard and uncertain present.