Masuleh

Masuleh's origins are usually given as a move rather than a founding: the inhabitants of an older settlement a few kilometres away, in a place still called Kohneh (Old) Masuleh, are said to have abandoned it and built on this steep slope, for better defence and better ground. The result is a village whose form was dictated entirely by the gradient, with every house set back on the roof of the one below.

Its living came from the mountains and the routes across them. Masuleh stood on a path between the Caspian plain of Gilan and the highlands towards Ardabil and Azerbaijan, and traders, muleteers and pastoralists passed through it. The smelting of sponge iron, in multi-stage furnaces whose remains have been studied in the valley, shaped the village's growth, and knives and metal goods worked here carried its name, alongside wool, felt and the produce of the forest. Houses were built from local clay, rubble and timber, rendered in the yellow ochre that gives the village its colour and makes it visible in mist.

Depopulation set in during the twentieth century as work moved to Rasht and Tehran, and many houses stood empty. Heritage protection turned that around: restoration work, guesthouses in village houses and the growth of domestic tourism have given Masuleh a new economy, and the village and its iron-smelting landscape have been the subject of archaeological study. It remains permanently inhabited, with a few hundred residents, rather than preserved as an empty monument.

The village belongs to Gilan, and its culture is that of the Caspian hills: its people are Gilak and Talysh, Talyshi and Gilaki are spoken at home alongside Persian for school, business and visitors, and the cooking, music and humour are those of the province rather than of the plateau. The wider area has long mixed settled farming with seasonal movement of herds to high pasture in summer.

Life on terraces has produced its own manners. Because roofs are streets, privacy depends on restraint: people do not linger at another household's edge or look down into courtyards, and children are taught early where they may and may not go. Neighbours are visible to each other all day, and the village functions as a single stepped courtyard, which visitors are expected to treat as somebody's home.

Crafts are a real part of local identity — knives and metalwork, wooden toys and utensils, felt and woollen slippers, mountain honey and preserved foods — and they fill the bazaar terraces. The religious calendar is the national one, with Muharram ceremonies held in the village mosques, Nowruz bringing the year's biggest crowds, and Yalda marked at home in December. Masuleh's image is widely used in Iranian photography, painting and tourism posters, and villagers are used to being photographed but not always pleased by it.

A few hundred people live permanently in Masuleh, a number that has fallen over the last century and swells enormously on holidays and summer weekends, when Iranian visitors fill the lanes and the guesthouses. The local economy now rests on that traffic: family-run guesthouses and homestays, tea houses and small restaurants, and the craft and food stalls of the bazaar, alongside livestock, honey, forest produce and work down on the plain.

The physical setting shapes every routine. Goods, building materials and rubbish all move by hand or by barrow up and down the steps, since no vehicle can enter; water runs through the village from the stream above; and washing, cooking and sitting happen on the roof terraces in front of each house. Damp is a constant adversary, with mist rolling through the lanes and rendering that needs regular repair.

Winter is quiet and often snowbound, the road up from Fuman occasionally closed for a time, and many families spend part of the cold months on the plain. Schools and clinics are limited, so children and the elderly are among the reasons people move down to Fuman or Rasht. The tension the village discusses is a familiar one for heritage places: how much tourism the terraces can take, how strictly restoration rules should be applied to houses people actually live in, and how to keep young families from leaving.

Masuleh eats Gilaki food, the most distinctive regional cooking in Iran: sour, garlicky, green and built on the rice grown on the plain below. Mirza ghasemi mashes smoked aubergine with garlic, tomato and egg; baghali ghatogh cooks broad beans with dill, garlic and egg; torsh tareh is a sour herb stew. Wild greens gathered in the surrounding forest go into omelettes, soups and fillings, and walnut and pomegranate appear in sauces such as the one served with chicken as morgh-e torsh.

Mountain produce is what the village itself sells. Honey from hives in the high pastures, dried herbs, walnuts, dairy from village flocks, sour fruit leathers and preserved vegetables fill the bazaar stalls, along with pickled garlic left to darken for years, a Gilan speciality. Skewered kebabs, grilled corn and salted sour plums are the everyday snacks eaten on the terraces.

Sweets come mostly from just down the hill: koluche from Fuman, a soft cookie that the town makes thinner and larger than its neighbours, is the standard gift, and reshteh khoshkar, a fried lattice of rice-flour batter filled with walnut and cardamom, is the Gilani pastry served with tea. Tea itself, grown in the gardens around Lahijan to the east, where tea was first planted in Iran, is drunk strong and black from small glasses at every hour, and the tea houses built onto the roofs are the village's main social spaces.