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Downtown Tehran

Appears in
Cooking in Iran: Regional Recipes and Kitchen Secrets

By Najmieh Batmanglij

Published 2020

  • About
The downtown Tehran of my childhood was full of trees. In those days Tehran had a population of about three million. Today, greater Tehran’s population is five times more. But you don’t feel that it is overcrowded. One reason might be that the city has more than a thousand parks.
Tehran is also much cleaner than many major cities—Istanbul, Athens, even New York. Another pleasant surprise for me was the traffic, which I found quite bearable, especially downtown where car entry was controlled.

Whenever I wanted to pay a cab driver and asked him what the fare had come to, he would say, “Qabeli nadareh,” meaning “It’s not an amount worth paying.” This is called “ta’arof ” (politesse or courteous politeness). Some call it insincere politeness, but I find nothing insincere about ta’arof. For me it’s a lovely gesture that is a hallmark of Iranian hospitality. Ta’arof is an elaborate, back-and-forth protocol about priority and hierarchy between people. It comes into play constantly in such things as who will go through the door first or who pays the bill. Keeping this in mind is not only a gesture of kindness but also an indication of good manners and politeness. It has nothing to do with insincerity; it is an endearing part of Iranian culture.

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