Iran

Persia was the seat of the first true world empire, the Achaemenid, founded by Cyrus the Great around 550 BC and ruling from the Nile to the Indus, with a ceremonial capital at Persepolis. Alexander of Macedon destroyed it, but Persian imperial traditions revived under the Parthians and then the Sasanians, who ruled until the Arab-Muslim conquest of the seventh century.

Islam took hold, but — unlike much of the region — the Persian language and a distinct Iranian identity survived and shaped a golden age of science, poetry, and philosophy. Turkic and Mongol dynasties followed, and in the sixteenth century the Safavids made Twelver Shia Islam the state religion, which still sets Iran apart from its mostly Sunni neighbours and gave Isfahan its great square and mosques.

The Qajar dynasty presided over decline and foreign interference; the Pahlavi shahs (from 1925) modernised and Westernised under an autocracy propped up by Britain and the United States — including a 1953 coup that removed a prime minister who had nationalised the oil industry. In 1979 a mass revolution overthrew the Shah and established an Islamic Republic under Ayatollah Khomeini, defined since by clerical rule under a Supreme Leader, the long Iran–Iraq War of the 1980s, hostility with the United States and Israel, nuclear disputes and sanctions, and recurring waves of domestic protest.

Persian culture places poetry near its centre. Ferdowsi, Rumi, Hafez, Saadi, and Omar Khayyam are quoted in daily conversation, and many households keep a divan of Hafez for guidance. Carpet-weaving, miniature painting, calligraphy, and the formal Persian garden (a UNESCO listing) are the classic arts, and Iranian cinema has an international following.

Nowruz, the Persian new year at the spring equinox, has Zoroastrian roots and is the biggest celebration of the year, with the haft-sin table, house visits, and a two-week holiday. Taarof, an elaborate code of ritual politeness — offering, refusing, insisting — governs invitations, payments, and gifts and can baffle newcomers.

Hospitality to guests is intense and sincere; travellers are routinely invited home for tea and a meal. The tea house (chaikhaneh), the bazaar, and the family gathering are the settings of social life. Iranian society is also visibly divided between the norms of the state and a large, young, often Western-leaning population, a tension that surfaces in periodic protest movements.

Around a fifth of Iran's roughly 88 million people live in Greater Tehran, a sprawling city climbing the Alborz foothills; Mashhad, Isfahan, Karaj, Shiraz, and Tabriz are the other large cities. The country is highly urban, with a young, well-educated population and high female university enrolment.

The economy is built on oil and gas, but years of sanctions, mismanagement, and isolation from the international financial system have produced high inflation, a collapsing currency, and a large "brain drain" of young professionals. Much business runs through informal networks and the bazaar, and state and Revolutionary Guard-linked entities control large parts of the economy.

Daily life is shaped by the compulsory dress code, the separation of the state's rules from private life behind closed doors, the price of everything rising, and the constant hospitality and social visiting that Iranians maintain regardless.

Persian cuisine is fragrant rather than fiery, built on rice, herbs, dried fruit, nuts, and slow-cooked stews. Chelo kabab — saffron rice with grilled lamb or minced-meat kababs — is the everyday restaurant staple. The stews (khoresht) include ghormeh sabzi (herbs, kidney beans, and dried lime), fesenjan (chicken or duck in a walnut and pomegranate sauce), and gheimeh (split peas and tomato).

Tahdig, the prized crisp golden crust from the bottom of the rice pot, is fought over at the table. Ash (thick soups), kuku (herb frittatas), dolmeh (stuffed vine leaves), and abgoosht/dizi (a lamb and chickpea stew mashed at the table) round out the repertoire, with sabzi khordan — a plate of fresh herbs, radish, and feta — alongside almost everything.

Tea, served black in small glasses with sugar cubes held between the teeth, is constant. Alcohol is illegal; the drinks are doogh (a savoury yoghurt drink), sharbat, and fresh pomegranate and carrot juice. Iranian sweets — gaz nougat from Isfahan, saffron ice cream, baklava — and dates and pistachios are the gifts and the pleasures.

Isfahan is the showpiece: Naqsh-e Jahan Square, one of the largest in the world, framed by the Shah (Imam) Mosque, the exquisite Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque, the Ali Qapu palace, and the covered bazaar, with historic bridges spanning the (often dry) river and an Armenian quarter across it. Shiraz, city of poets, has the tombs of Hafez and Saadi, the vivid stained glass of the Nasir al-Mulk "Pink Mosque," the Vakil bazaar, and the ruins of Persepolis and the royal Achaemenid tombs an hour away.

Yazd, a mud-brick desert city with a skyline of badgir windcatchers, keeps a living Zoroastrian community, a fire that has burned for centuries, and the hilltop Towers of Silence, and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in its entirety. Kashan has grand historic merchant houses and the classic Fin garden; Tehran has the crown jewels, the Golestan Palace, the Grand Bazaar, and the National Museum.

For landscape, the Alborz and Zagros mountains offer trekking and skiing, the Dasht-e Lut and Dasht-e Kavir deserts have some of the hottest recorded surface temperatures and dramatic yardang formations, the Caspian forests and rice terraces are lush and green, and the rock village of Kandovan and the stepped village of Masuleh are among the country's most striking settlements.