Tehran

Tehran (About this sound pronunciation (help·info); Persian: تهران – Tehrān‎‎) is the capital of Iran and Tehran Province. With a population of around 9 million in the city and 16 million in the wider metropolitan area, Tehran is the largest city and urban area of Iran, the second largest city in Western Asia, and the 3rd largest in the Middle East. It is ranked 29th in the world by the population of its metropolitan area.

In the Classical era, part of the present-day city of Tehran was occupied by a Median city which in the Avesta occurs as Rhaga. It was destroyed by the Mongols in the early 13th century, and remains now as a city in Tehran Province, located towards the south end of the modern-day city of Tehran.

Tehran was first chosen as the capital of Iran by Agha Mohammad Khan of the Qajar dynasty in 1796, in order to remain in close reach of Iran's territories in the Caucasus, at that time still part of Iran, and to avoid vying factions of previous Iranian dynasties. The capital has been moved several times throughout the history, and Tehran is the 32nd national capital of Iran.

The city was the seat of Qajars and Pahlavis, the two last imperial dynasties of the country. It is home to many historical monuments, such as the royal complexes of Golestan, Saadabad, and Niavaran, as well as the country's most important governmental buildings of the modern period.

Large scale demolition and rebuilding began in the 1920s, and Tehran has been subject of mass migration of people from all over Iran, since the 20th century.

The most famous landmarks of the city include the Azadi Tower, a memorial built during the Pahlavi period, and the Milad Tower, the world's 17th tallest freestanding structure which was built in 2007. The newly built Tabiat Bridge is considered as the 3rd symbol of the city.

Majority of the people of Tehran are Persian-speaking people who identify themselves as Persians, and roughly 99% of the population understand and speak Persian; but there are also populations of other Iranian ethnicities such as Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Lurs, and Kurds who speak Persian as their second language.

Tehran is served by the Mehrabad and Khomeini international airports, a central railway station, the rapid transit rail system of Tehran Metro, as well as trolleybus and BRT systems, and has a huge network of highways.

There have been plans to relocate Iran's capital from Tehran to another area; due mainly to air pollution and the city's exposure to earthquakes.

History


The origin of the name Tehran is uncertain. Settlement of Tehran dates back over 7,000 years.
Classical era

The present-day city of Tehran was a suburb of an important Median city which was known as Rhaga in Old Persian. In the Avesta's Videvdat (i, 15), Rhaga is mentioned as the twelfth sacred place created by the Ohrmazd. In Old Persian inscriptions, Rhaga appears as a province (Behistun 2, 10–18). It was a major area for the Iranian tribes of Medes and Achaemenids. From Rhaga, Darius the Great sent reinforcements to his father Hystaspes, who was putting down the rebellion in Parthia (Behistun 3, 1–10). In some Middle Persian texts, Rhaga is given as the birthplace of Zoroaster,[14] although modern historians generally place the birth of Zoroaster in Khorasan. Derived into Modern Persian as Rey, it remains now as a city located towards the south end of the modern-day City of Tehran, absorbed into the Greater Tehran metropolitan area.

Mount Damavand, the highest peak of Iran which is located near Tehran, is an important location in Ferdowsi's Shahname,[15] the long Iranian epic poem which is based on ancient epics of Iran. It appears in the epics as the birthplace of Manuchehr, the residence of Keyumars, the place where Freydun bounds the dragon-fiend Aži Dahāka, and the place where Arash the Archer shot his arrow from.[15]
Medieval period

During the Sassanid era, in 641, Yazdgerd III issued his last appeal to the nation from Rey, before fleeing to Khorasan. Rey was dominated by the Parthian Mihran family, and Siyavakhsh, the son of Mihran the son of Bahram Chobin, who resisted the Muslim Invasion. Because of this resistance, when the Arabs captured Rey, they ordered the town to be destroyed, and ordered Farrukhzad to rebuild the town.

There is a temple in Rey, which is said to be one of the temples of Anahita, a cosmological figure in Iranian mythology. After the Muslim Invasion, the temple became dedicated to the eldest daughter of Yazdgerd III, Bibi Shahr Banou, who married to Husayn ibn Ali, the fourth leader of the Shia faith.

Tehran was a well known village in the 9th century, but less known than the city of Rey which was flourishing nearby. Najm od Din Razi, known as Daya, declared the population of Rey as 500,000 before the Mongol Invasion.

In the 10th century, Rey was described in details by Islamic geographers. Despite the interest of Baghdad displayed in Rey, the number of Arabs there was insignificant, and the population consisted of Persians of all classes.[16] The Oghuz Turks invaded Rey discretely in 1035 and 1042, but the city was recovered during the Seljuq and Khwarazmian eras.

In the 13th century, the Mongols laid Rey to a complete waste and massacred its inhabitants. Following the invasion, many of the city's inhabitants escaped to Tehran, and the new residence took over its role.

In July 1404, Ruy González de Clavijo, a Castilian ambassador, visited Tehran while on a journey to Samarkand, the capital of Timur, who ruled Iran at the time. Clavijo later described Tehran as an unwalled region under the Timurid Empire.
Early modern era

When the Italian traveler Pietro della Valle passed a night at the city in 1618, he mentioned it as "Taheran" in his memoirs, while Thomas Herbert mentioned it as "Tyroan." Herbert stated that the city held 3,000 houses in 1627.[17]
A portrait of Mohammad Khan Qajar, kept at the V&A Museum

In the early 18th century, Karim Khan of the Zand dynasty ordered a palace and a government office to be built in Tehran, possibly to declare the city his capital, but he later moved his government to Shiraz. Eventually, the Qajar king Agha Mohammad Khan was the first to choose Tehran as the capital of Iran, in 1776.

Agha Mohammad Khan's choice of his capital was based on a similar concern for the control of both the northern and the southern regions of Iran. He was aware of the loyalties of the inhabitants of the previous capitals, Isfahan and Shiraz, to the Safavid and Zand dynasties, respectively, and was wary of the power of the notables in these cities. He probably viewed Tehran's lack of a substantial urban structure as a blessing, because it minimized the chances of resistance to his rule by the notables and by the general public. Moreover, he had to remain within close reach of Azerbaijan and Iran's integral Caucasian territories in the North and South Caucasus, at that time not yet irrevocably lost per the treaties of Golestan and Turkmenchay to the neighboring Imperial Russia, which would follow in the course of the 19th century.
Map of Tehran City in 1857

After 50 years of Qajar rule, the city still barely had more than 80,000 inhabitants.

Up through the 1870s, Tehran consisted of a walled citadel, a roofed bazaar, and sharestan, where the masses resided in the three main neighborhoods of Udlajan, Chale Meydan, and Sangelaj. The first development plan of Tehran in 1855 emphasized the traditional spatial structure. Architecture, however, found an eclectic expression to reflect the new lifestyle.

The second major planning exercise in Tehran took place under the supervision of Dar ol Fonun. The map of 1878 included new city walls, in the form of a perfect octagon with an area of 19 square kilometers, which mimicked the Renaissance cities of Europe.
Late modern era

As a response to the growing social consciousness of civil rights, on June 2, 1907, the first parliament of the Persian Constitutional Revolution passed a law on local governance known as the Baladie Law. The second and third articles of the law, on Baladie Community (or the city council), provide a detailed outline on issues such as the role of the councils in the city, the members' qualifications, the election process, and the requirements to be entitled to vote.

After the First World War, Reza Shah immediately suspended the Baladie Law of 1907, and the decentralized and autonomous city councils were replaced by centralist approaches of governance and planning.

From the 1920s to 1930s, the city was essentially rebuilt from scratch, under the rule of Reza Shah Pahlavi. Reza Shah believed that ancient buildings such as large parts of the Golestan Palace, Tekie Dowlat, the Toopkhane Square, the city fortifications, and the old citadel among others, should not be part of a modern city. They were systematically demolished, and modern buildings in the pre-Islamic Iranian style, such as the National Bank, the Police Headquarters, the Telegraph Office, and the Military Academy, were built in their place. The Grand Bazaar of Tehran was divided in half and many historic buildings were demolished, in order to build wide straight avenues in the capital. Many Persian gardens also fell victim to new construction projects.[21]

The changes in the urban fabric started with the street-widening act of 1933 which served as a framework for changes in all other cities. As a result of this act, the traditional texture of the city was replaced with cruciform intersecting streets creating large roundabouts, located on the major public spaces such as the bazaar.

As an attempt to create a network for the easy movement of goods and vehicles in Tehran, the city walls and gates were demolished in 1937 and replaced by wide streets cutting through the urban fabric. The new city map of Tehran in 1937 was heavily influenced by modernist planning patterns of zoning and gridiron network.

During the Second World War, Soviet and British troops entered the city. Tehran was the site of the Tehran Conference in 1943, attended by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.