UntamedIran

An atlas of singular places

Iran was never one story.

Deserts that kill. Ruins older than the alphabet. Water carried under the desert for forty kilometres, and silence you can hear. Sixty-nine untamed stories, ten threads — choose where to begin.

One colour per place — every guide has its own palette


Explore by story

Ten threads, Sixty-nine untamed stories

All 69 places

The full index

Or find it by name

Nothing answers to that — try fewer letters, or let the map choose.

The through-line

My Cigarette Moments

Throughout these journeys, wherever I found myself absorbed in the beauty of a thing or a place, lost in thought about one particular question, or overtaken by a feeling too strange and large to name — I lit a cigarette. I have tried to bring the stories of those cigarettes into these articles, as briefly as I could, in a small section called My Cigarette Moments.

And what is better than that — flat on your back at the most serious theatre in the world, getting to smoke your way through the whole of it?

Cigarette #1
Pick a place. Follow the smoke. →