Shiraz

Shiraz is an Islamic-era city on a much older site, its name recorded as Tiraziš on Elamite tablets: the modern city was founded or restored in 693, after the Arab conquest, by a kinsman of the Umayyad governor of the east. Its first golden age came under the Buyids in the tenth century, when it was one of the leading cities of the Islamic world for learning, and it gained a reputation for gardens, wine and poets that it never lost. The local Salghurid rulers submitted to the Mongols in the thirteenth century, which spared the city the destruction suffered elsewhere; Saadi lived and wrote here then, and Hafez a century later.

The city's second peak was the Zand period. Karim Khan, who took power over much of Iran after the fall of Nader Shah, made Shiraz his capital in the 1760s and built the citadel that carries his name, the Vakil mosque, bathhouse and bazaar, and a ring of walls and moats. He called himself the regent, vakil, rather than shah. After his death in 1779 the Zands lost a civil war to the Qajars, who moved the capital to Tehran, destroyed the fortifications and left Shiraz a provincial town. Earthquakes and the long nineteenth-century decline reduced it further.

Modern growth came with the twentieth century: roads and a rail link, the founding of what is now Shiraz University, oil-era money, and a large university and hospital sector that made the city a regional centre. An international festival of arts ran in the city and at Persepolis from 1967 to 1977, and the Shah's celebration of 2,500 years of monarchy was staged at Persepolis in 1971. The revolution of 1979 ended that era, and the city has since grown into the largest in southern Iran.

No Iranian city is more bound up with poetry. Hafez and Saadi are buried here, and their tombs are not museums but places of use: people come in the evening to read a ghazal aloud, to take a fal-e Hafez, a fortune drawn at random from the poet's collected works, and to sit under the cypresses with tea. Lines from both poets turn up in everyday speech and on carpets, tilework and gravestones across the country.

The garden is the other Shirazi art. The classic walled Persian garden, with its straight watercourse, cypress avenues and pavilion at the cross-axis, reached one of its finest forms here, and Eram Garden is part of the UNESCO listing that covers the type. Orange trees line the city's older streets, and their blossom in spring is treated as a public event. Wine made from Shiraz grapes was famous for centuries and written about by the poets; alcohol has been illegal since 1979, and the connection survives only in literature and in the name used abroad for an unrelated grape variety.

Religion in the city centres on Shah Cheragh, a pilgrimage shrine whose mirrored interior draws visitors from across Iran, and Muharram brings processions through the old quarters. Fars province is also the homeland of the Qashqai, a Turkic confederation of pastoralists whose weaving and seasonal migrations remain part of the region's identity, and whose carpets and gabbehs are sold in the bazaar. Shirazis have a national reputation for being easy-going, talkative and devoted to picnics, and the city's own humour turns on that image.

About two million people live in Shiraz, making it Iran's fifth largest city and the main centre of the south. It is a university city above all — Shiraz University, a large medical school and several other institutions draw students from across the country — and a medical centre whose hospitals serve the whole province. Electronics and petrochemical industries, food processing and the farming of the Fars plains, with its citrus, grapes and cereals, round out the economy, alongside the tourism that in ordinary times brings most of Iran's foreign visitors here.

The city is laid out on long boulevards running north-west to south-east along the valley, with the first metro line following the same axis. Newer housing has climbed the slopes and spread into the orchard land of Qasr-e Dasht, while the old quarters south of the bazaar have seen courtyard houses restored as hotels and restaurants alongside blocks that are still crowded and poor. Water is a constant worry: the region's rainfall has been low for years, the lake south-east of the city dries out, and supply restrictions are part of life.

Days begin early and pause in the afternoon heat of summer, when shops close and reopen towards evening. The national economic crisis — high inflation and a currency that has lost most of its value — bears on households here as elsewhere, and young graduates leave for Tehran or abroad. Fridays are for family visits and picnics in the gardens, on the slopes above the Quran Gate, or out among the orchards.

The dish most associated with the city is kalam polo Shirazi, rice steamed with cabbage, herbs and small meatballs scented with cinnamon and a little rosewater. Beside it sit the national staples cooked in local versions: kababs of lamb and minced meat with grilled tomatoes, and thick stews such as ghormeh sabzi of herbs and dried lime. Shirazi salad — cucumber, tomato and onion diced small and dressed with lime juice — is named after the city and eaten with everything.

Sweets and cold things are the real speciality. Faloodeh-ye Shirazi is thin frozen noodles of starch in a syrup of rose water and sugar, eaten with lime juice squeezed over it and often with ice cream; masghati, a soft, fragrant starch-based sweet studded with almonds or pistachios, is the other local confection, along with candied orange peel and rosewater-scented pastries. Both are sold near the poets' tombs and in the bazaar, and the city's reputation for them reaches every province.

The bazaar is the place to see what the countryside produces: dates, dried limes, citrus, pistachios, rosewater distilled in the villages, and herbs sold by the armful. Bread comes flat and hot from the oven — sangak baked on stones, barbari, taftoon — and is eaten at breakfast with cheese, walnuts and herbs. Tea is constant and dark, drunk through a lump of sugar. Alcohol is illegal; the drinks on offer are doogh, salted yoghurt thinned with water, and sharbats made with rose, quince or lime.