Shushtar

Shushtar exists because of the river. The Karun leaves the Zagros here and runs across the Khuzestan plain, and a channel, the Gargar, was cut through rock to the east of the town, turning the site into an island between two arms of water; parts of the system are traditionally traced back to Darius the Great. Under the Sasanians the island city was chosen as a summer capital. Dams, weirs, tunnels and mill races were added over centuries until the town sat at the centre of a machine for lifting, dividing and using water, driving mills and irrigating the plain below.

The most famous piece of it is Sasanian. Shapur I, who defeated and captured the Roman emperor Valerian in the third century AD, is said to have used Roman prisoners to build the great bridge-weir across the Karun known ever since as the Band-e Kaisar, Caesar's dam. The work combined Roman bridge building with Iranian irrigation engineering, and the system it anchored supported sugarcane plantations and mills that made the district wealthy in the early Islamic centuries, when Shushtar was one of the notable towns of Khuzestan.

Decline followed the silting and damage of later centuries, and the town shrank into a provincial place of brick houses and orchards. Khuzestan's oil century brought Ahvaz and Abadan to prominence rather than Shushtar, and the Iran–Iraq War of 1980–88 turned the province into a battlefield, with the frontier only a short distance west. The waterworks were restored and studied through the twentieth century, and their inscription as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2009 confirmed the town's standing as a monument to ancient engineering.

Khuzestan is the most mixed province in Iran, and Shushtar sits at the meeting point of its communities: Persian-speaking townspeople with their own Shushtari dialect, Arabic-speaking families whose kin live across the plain and over the border, and Bakhtiari Lurs from the mountains just to the east who still bring flocks down to the lowlands for the winter. Arabic, Persian and Luri are all heard, and marriages, music and cooking cross between them.

The town's architecture is a response to heat. Houses were built of brick around shaded courtyards, with wind catchers above them and cool rooms cut into the soft rock below, where families could escape the worst of the summer. Rooftops and the terraces above the water were the evening living rooms. Water itself is a matter of local pride: the falls and mills are where people take visitors, and the engineering is taught as the town's inheritance.

Religious life follows the Shia calendar, with Muharram the most intense period of the year, when processions move through the old quarter and neighbourhood groups provide food to all comers. Hospitality is unforced and insistent, shaped by taarof; guests are fed, given tea, and pressed to stay. Music at weddings tends to the Arab and Bakhtiari styles of the region, with drums and the sorna oboe, and dancing in lines with sticks or scarves.

About 100,000 people live in Shushtar, in a district of irrigated farmland that is among the most productive in Iran. Sugarcane, planted here since antiquity and revived on a large scale in the modern era, dominates the plain, along with wheat, citrus, dates and vegetables, and the mills and processing plants attached to them employ many townspeople. Government offices, schools, the hospital and the small tourism economy around the World Heritage Site make up much of the rest, and Ahvaz and Dezful draw commuters.

The town's rhythm is dictated by heat for half the year. In summer work begins at dawn, the streets empty by late morning, and life restarts at dusk; in winter the days are mild and the surrounding countryside is green. Water supply, pollution from industry and dust storms blowing in from the dried marshlands to the west are the region's recurring problems, and the state of the Karun — its flow reduced by dams upstream — is a constant local subject.

Khuzestan is oil-rich and has long felt poorly served by the wealth it produces, a grievance that surfaces in protests over water, jobs and services. The national economic crisis of recent years, with its high inflation and collapsing currency, weighs on households here as elsewhere, and young people leave for Ahvaz, Tehran or abroad. Older residents still remember the war years, when the province was the front line and much of its population was displaced.

Shushtar eats like Khuzestan, which means food with more chilli, tamarind and sourness than the Iranian plateau and a strong Arab influence. The regional signature is ghalyeh mahi, a dark stew of fish cooked with onion, heavy spice and a mass of fresh coriander, served with rice; made with shrimp from the Gulf it becomes ghalyeh meygu. Shushtar's own speciality is halim, a breakfast of wheatmeal cooked with shredded lamb. River fish from the Karun, grilled or fried, is common, and rice is often cooked with dill and broad beans or with fish stock.

Street food here is closer to Iraq and the Gulf than to Tehran: falafel in flatbread with pickles and hot sauce, and sambuseh, fried triangular pastries of spiced meat or lentils, are sold from small counters in the evening. Bread is baked flat and thin in clay ovens, and breakfast is bread with fresh cheese, dates and sweet tea. Yoghurt soups and herb stews such as ghormeh sabzi appear at home as they do nationally.

The plain's own produce fills the market: dates from the groves, citrus, cucumbers and melons, and the sugar of the cane fields, which reaches the table as syrup and in the very sweet tea drunk all day. Dried limes, tamarind and hot spice mixes are the store-cupboard staples. Alcohol is illegal in Iran; the cold drinks are doogh, salted yoghurt thinned with water, fresh lime and mint sharbats, and fruit juice, all of which matter a great deal in a place this hot.