Tehran

Tehran was a walled village of gardens and underground houses north of the great city of Rey when the Mongols destroyed Rey in the 13th century, and it grew slowly on its ruins as a market town on the road between the plateau and the Caspian. The Safavids gave it a bazaar and a wall in the 16th century, and Karim Khan Zand briefly used it as a base, but the decisive moment came in 1786, when Agha Mohammad Khan, founder of the Qajar dynasty, chose it as his capital for its position between the tribal north-west and the heart of the country.

Under the Qajars the town became a city. The Golestan Palace grew into a royal complex of mirrored halls and tiled courtyards, new gates and squares were laid out, and in the 1870s Naser al-Din Shah pulled down the old wall and replaced it with a far larger octagonal moat and rampart. Tehran was the stage of the constitutional revolution of 1906, when merchants and clergy took sanctuary and forced the shah to accept a parliament.

Reza Shah's government cut wide avenues through the old fabric in the 1930s, removed the walls and built ministries, a railway station and a university. The city then spread north up the slope and swallowed the old hill villages of Shemiran. Allied troops occupied it in 1941, and in 1943 it hosted the Tehran Conference. It was the centre of the 1953 coup and of the revolution of 1979, and during the Iran-Iraq war it was hit by missiles. Growth since has been relentless, north over the foothills and west towards Karaj.

Tehran is a city of migrants from every province, and its manner — fast, crowded, status-conscious, quick with a joke — is its own rather than any region's. The divide people talk about most is between north and south: the cooler, wealthier hillside districts with their cafés and galleries, and the older working-class quarters on the plain around the bazaar, more traditional and more religious. Much of what visitors notice about the city is negotiated between those poles and within the limits of the law.

It is the centre of Iranian cultural production. Publishers and bookshops line Enghelab Street, the Fajr festivals fill cinemas and concert halls each winter, and Iranian cinema, which has won prizes around the world, is largely made here. Galleries cluster in the northern districts, and the Museum of Contemporary Art holds one of the most remarkable collections of modern Western art outside Europe and North America. Poetry is quoted in ordinary conversation, and Hafez and Ferdowsi are household names.

Football divides the city: the Tehran derby between Persepolis and Esteghlal is followed with intensity across the country. The weekend, which falls on Friday, sends families to the mountain paths at Darband and Darakeh, to the parks, or north over the Alborz to the Caspian. Hospitality is taken seriously, taarof governs offers and refusals, and guests are pressed to eat far more than they intended.

Around nine million people live in the city and more than twelve million in Tehran province, with another large population in neighbouring Karaj; a great many commute daily between them. The city is the seat of government, of banking, of the universities and of much of Iran's industry, and jobs in ministries, state companies, hospitals and the bazaar sustain much of it, alongside a large informal economy of drivers, traders and small workshops.

The day starts early and runs late. Traffic dominates it, and millions use the metro and the shared taxis that ply fixed routes, calling their destination through the window. Shops open in the morning, many close in the early afternoon and reopen until late evening, and social life happens after dark, in parks, on the mountain paths and in cafés. Apartment living is the norm, in towers that have replaced most of the old courtyard houses.

The concerns people discuss are consistent: inflation and the cost of housing, which pushes families further west and south, air pollution that closes schools on the worst winter days, water shortages, land subsidence beneath the southern plain, and the strain of sanctions on incomes and medicine. Earthquake risk is a constant in the background, since major faults run along the foot of the Alborz. The war that began in February 2026 has added its own disruptions to travel, aviation and daily routine.

Tehran eats from the whole country, since every province has sent migrants to it, but it has staples of its own. Chelow kabab — rice with grilled meat, a knob of butter, grilled tomato and sumac — is the standard restaurant meal, whether the meat is minced koobideh, lamb chops or saffron chicken. Dizi, also called abgoosht, is the lunchtime dish of the old city: lamb, chickpeas and potatoes cooked in a stone pot, the broth poured off and drunk while the rest is pounded to a paste and eaten with bread, onion and herbs.

Breakfast can be halim, a wheat and meat porridge, or the older kalleh pacheh of sheep's head and trotters, sold before dawn. Street food means liver kebabs grilled on the pavement, beetroot and steamed broad beans in winter, corn and sour plums on the mountain paths in summer. Stews are the home cooking: ghormeh sabzi of herbs, kidney beans and dried lime; gheymeh with split peas; and fesenjan of walnuts and pomegranate.

Bread is bought fresh from bakeries several times a week — sangak baked on hot stones, barbari, taftoon and lavash. Tea is drunk black from small glasses, often with a sugar lump held in the teeth, and the shops sell gaz nougat, sohan and baklava in boxes as gifts. Ice cream flavoured with saffron and rosewater, and faloodeh of frozen noodles with lime, are summer fixtures.