Kermanshah

The place-name is old — it is usually traced to the Sasanian period, when kings of that dynasty made the valley a royal resort and had the grottoes of Taq-e Bostan carved into the cliff in the fourth to seventh centuries AD, showing investiture scenes, a heavily armoured horseman and royal hunts in the reed beds. The setting was not accidental. The city stands on the natural corridor between the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia, the route that later carried caravans between Baghdad and Hamadan, and the same corridor had already drawn Darius the Great to carve his great inscription on the rock at Bisotun, a short way east, around 520 BC.

After the Arab conquest the town lived on that traffic, suffered in the Mongol and later invasions, and was repeatedly fought over between Ottoman and Iranian forces because of its position near the frontier. Its modern shape is Qajar: in the nineteenth century governors and merchants grown rich on the border trade built mosques, caravanserais and the tiled mourning halls that remain the finest buildings in the old quarter, while the bazaar became the market for the grain, livestock and clarified butter of the surrounding Kurdish countryside.

The twentieth century brought a hard turn. Lying close to the border, Kermanshah was bombed and shelled through the Iran–Iraq War of 1980–88, and many residents left for other provinces; the city was rebuilt and grew quickly afterwards with people moving in from the villages. A magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck the province in November 2017, killing more than 600 people in Iran and Iraq and destroying much housing in the towns west of the city, and reconstruction shaped the years that followed.

Kermanshah is the largest mainly Kurdish city in Iran, and language marks it out: Southern Kurdish and the local Kermanshahi variety are heard in the bazaar alongside Persian, and Laki and Luri are spoken in parts of the province. Kurdish dress — wide trousers gathered at the ankle, a wound sash, headscarves with coins and fringes for women — is still worn in the villages and at weddings, and the daf, a large frame drum with rings inside the hoop, and the shemshal flute carry the region's music. Line dances in which dancers link little fingers are the standard form at any celebration.

Religion is layered here. Most residents are Shia Muslims, and the Qajar tekyehs in the bazaar quarter exist for the Muharram mourning processions, which are the city's biggest religious gatherings; their tilework, unusually, mixes Karbala scenes with Achaemenid kings and Qajar portraits. The province is also a centre of the Yarsani faith, a distinct religion with its own scriptures and tanbur music, and there are Sunni Kurdish communities in the mountains to the north-west.

Everyday manners follow the national pattern: taarof, the exchange of offers and polite refusals, shapes every invitation and every attempt to pay, and guests are pressed with food and tea well past the point of politeness. Poetry matters, including verse in Kurdish, and the legend of Farhad the stonemason, who according to the Khosrow and Shirin story cut the cliff at Bisotun for love, is local property. People are used to being seen as provincial by Tehran and are quietly proud of the antiquity of their corner of the country.

About 1.1 million people live in the city, one of the largest in western Iran and the capital of a province of roughly two million. It grew by absorbing the countryside: several generations of migration from Kurdish villages, and from the border towns emptied during the war with Iraq, produced wide districts of low brick housing spreading west and north from the old centre. The bazaar, the provincial administration and the hospitals employ much of the city; there are oil refining and petrochemical works nearby, sugar and food processing, cement, and farming across the surrounding plains, which are among Iran's better grain and livestock country.

The province has long had some of the country's highest unemployment, and the national economic crisis — a collapsing currency and high inflation — is felt sharply in a city with few well-paid jobs. Young people leave for Tehran, Isfahan or abroad, a drain that older residents talk about openly. Housing built quickly in the growth years is of mixed quality, and the 2017 earthquake made building standards a live subject across the region.

The rhythm of the day is set by the heat and by the bazaar. Shops open early, empty in the afternoon and fill again in the evening, when families walk in the parks below Taq-e Bostan, buy grilled corn and ice cream and stay out late in summer. Friday is the day off, spent with relatives or on picnics at the springs and river valleys in the mountains, with a rug, a kettle and a gas burner.

Kermanshah's name on a menu anywhere in Iran usually means one of two things: dande kabab, racks of lamb ribs marinated and grilled over charcoal, or roghan-e kermanshahi, a clarified butter made from sheep's and goats' milk whose strong, nutty taste flavours rice and stews and which is sold by weight in the bazaar. The Kurdish dishes of the province include khoresh-e tareh, a stew made with chives, and sib polow, rice cooked with potatoes, while khoresh bademjan, the national stew of lamb with aubergine and tomato, appears in local kitchens in its own version.

Breads and sweets are the other speciality. Nan-e berenji, crumbly biscuits of rice flour flavoured with cardamom and scattered with poppy seeds, originated in Kermanshah and is the city's standard gift to take home. Bakeries turn out the flat sangak baked on hot stones and barbari for breakfast, eaten with fresh cheese, walnuts and herbs. A thick soup called ash, with herbs, pulses and noodles, is the cold-weather staple, and a headier local dish is kalleh pacheh, sheep's head and trotters, sold at dawn.

Tea arrives constantly, poured dark from a samovar and drunk through a lump of sugar held in the teeth, with dried mulberries or raisins beside the glass. Alcohol is illegal in Iran; the alternatives are doogh, salted yoghurt thinned with water and sometimes fizzy, sharbat made with rose or vinegar and mint, and the sour-cherry and lime cordials sold in the juice shops along the main streets.