The Good Old Days In Esfahan

Hovik Davidian comes home after a long hard day of work to a relaxing cup of tea until he is refreshed again. He enjoys the rest of the evening with his wife and later goes to bed in the warm luscious air that circulates inside of his home. At age 70, he has lived a long life and is still able to share his memories from childhood on his small town life in Esfahan, Iran. These were the days, he says, in which a person spent more time with their family then they did with their friends in teens today. He was very active as a child living in a small town and participated in many sports and activities that he enjoyed doing. Hovik shares some stories on beautiful scenery from things like mosaics and campgrounds that he still remembers seeing in detail from the time that he was a child acquainted by his grandfather.

The town that I lived in is called Esfahan and it’s located in Iran. The climate of that town helped develop agriculture and industry a lot. The town has over 1,000 years of history, which is now a very big town.

Being in a small town you see many familiar faces almost everyday but nevertheless we had some people who contributed a lot to that town. One of them was our catholic bishop from our church. I was born in 1936, and I remember it was 1940-42 when I was a small boy attending the church. He was a connecting person from our Armenian society in the small town to the Iranian government. When we had problems he would go and talk to them and get permissions for different things; he was pretty good for our society and almost everybody knew him. He was well respected and gave respect back to us (his followers), Sundays at church, or outside on the street, or while visiting the schools at that time. Armenians were as a minority in Iran because Iran is like 85-90% of the Islamic religion so there are some minorities like Armenian and Jewish religions and also some older Iranian religion, which is the Zarathustra.

When you have a minority religion in a majority usually you have some conflicts here and there but not that big that it harassed us. In my time our elderly told us if possible and if we have a chance, participate in their customs in order to get more familiar with their habits and the celebrations that would benefit both sides.

The town wasn’t that diverse because 600 years ago after the war they actually brought many Armenians from the northern part of the land to our part of the town and granted them the land and a place to have their own culture grow. We were not that diverse but the bigger town that was close to Esfahan was mixed but no Armenians were living in that part at that time until the second world in 1939-40. After that it became a little bit diverse. I think it was positive because the Islamic-Iranians knew that the Armenians are good handworkers since they were doing a lot of crafts with gold and silver. They would come to the town and buy those products and Armenians would go to the Islamic part of the city and buy different products that they didn’t produce. So it was profiting both sides.

The town was really segregated because of the provision of intercultural marriages. We were not allowed to marry other than our own people of our culture like Armenians, and the Jews that were living in part of the town were also not allowed to marry other than their own people in their culture. Muslim-Iranians wouldn’t dare to have any suggestion to get married with another culture, so this was a really segregated style of living in the town.

One major limitation that I can talk about was our school. In the Armenian schools although we had a curriculum of the Iranian government the school was hundred percent Armenian students. No Muslims would register to those schools because they knew that the majority were Armenian Christians. Practically, the school was segregated from the other schools and Muslims-Iranians in other parts of the town had their own schools which no Armenian would attend. Armenian schools had mixed boys and girls but Muslim-Iranian schools they were separated with boys’ schools and girls’ schools.

A traditional celebration was usually connecting to the religion, like Easter was a big celebration; Armenian schools were off when other schools were not. We also had a week and a half off on Christmas; that was a bigger celebration. Those religious celebrations gave us the chance to gather around with many families like my uncle, aunt, and other relatives.

The food was a mixture of Iranian tradition and of Armenian but mainly, as everybody in Iran, rice was a major food and always a major dish that comes on the table with different ingredients like meat, gravy, carrots, and vegetables. Esfahan was good in agricultural products so we always had fresh lettuce, vegetables, greens and many other things that we didn’t have to import.

We also had sports activities, gaming, and scouting. We had small groups of scouting where kids and children could participate on the weekends with picnicking and sport activities like soccer, basketball, or hiking. The most interesting free time activity was fishing because in the middle of the town there is a big river. We would take our bikes and ride them about half an hour to the very good part of the river. Then we would picnic there and make a fire and even eat and cook the fish right on that area.

I have very good memories of that time with friends and relatives, which later went out of the town. I left the town around 1950 but there was a part of it during the second world war like in the beginning of 1940s which we knew through the news that there was a war going on but as I said the town was somehow self-contained; we didn’t have supply problems so we overcame the effects of the second world war.

My grandfather was a famous carpenter in the town and old houses that we were living in were all big with big land. There were partitions of sometimes three to four families that were living in one house. The house was so big that my grandfather had his workshop at home and he was doing a lot of woodwork making tables and chairs. He taught me carpentry. The machinery was very little at that time so it made me really happy to do. I made many small boxes from wood and I would sell them sometimes to my friends but I made very little money. With that money you could buy things in the big towns that were close to the bazaar, which was called the Market place of the old town.

The bazaars in the Islamic world are very interesting because they are very long corridors with closed ceilings. Each long corridor is like half a mile long that’s belonging to a special trade. The traditional eastern bazaars are very famous in Turkey, Arabia, and different countries.

Esfahan has very nice Islamic architecture in the town but not in our part. Our part was famous because Armenians built fourteen different churches there all belonging to our Armenian apostolic church. Inside you have small mosaics, and paintings, and wall decorations. When you go to the Moslemic part of the town, there you see the Islamic mosaics with the decoration of gold and blue and many different colors.

I liked the palace of the Shah—one of the kings many years ago—because my grandfather took me and my friends always to visit that palace called Alighapoo. In that palace was a room about thirty feet by forty and if you stood in the middle of the room and said a word, that word would echo seven times.

An unforgettable pastime I had was when there was a mountain close to the town which we were living by. The shape of the mountain was like a flat table at the top, as if somebody had flattened it. On the lower part of that mountain there was a water spring. My grandfather would take my three brothers and me to hike up the mountain. We would stay there for a night and hear the pleasuring sound of the water coming from the mountain. That’s one thing I don’t forget even until today.

Interviewed by Ared Baghram