Iran and Mehre khavaran

Our journey today takes us 4,404 miles across the globe to explore the rich tapestry of Iranian culture through its national anthem, “Maree Kavaran,” a piece that intricately intertwines national pride with a spiritual and historical narrative. As we navigate this complex terrain, we’ll uncover how this anthem not only reflects the ethos of a nation but also the profound influences of its tumultuous history, including the impact of significant wars and revolutions. I’ll share insights into the song’s composition, blending Western orchestral elements with traditional Persian modal music, illustrating how it represents the heart and soul of Iran. Moreover, we’ll examine the life stories of the anthem's creators, poet Saeed Bulgari and composer Hassan Riahi, whose artistic expressions were shaped by the sociopolitical landscape of their time. So buckle up as we embark on this delightful audio expedition, where history, music, and a bit of clever commentary come together to bring Iran’s anthem to life.

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Welcome to the Anthems Podcast. I'm Patrick and I'm here to tell you the story of a song that helps to tell the story of a nation.

Today we are traveling 4,404 miles, or 7,088 kilometers, and we're going to travel at the whim of the wind on a hot air balloon.

That means that steering is going to be a creative endeavor because I learned that that is just varying your altitude to find a wind current pointing the correct direction. It also means traveling at the speed of the wind and at the right heights. People have gotten these things going very fast.

And in: 1987

At 50 that speed, our trip would just be under 39 days time it just right and we can land on June 5th to celebrate our target country's Hot Air Balloon Day. Which means that if you knew about this particular unofficial holiday, then you knew I was going to be telling you about Iran.

Officially the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Today we are headed to a country that is the birthplace of the game of polo, where it originated as a training exercise for cavalry with as many as a hundred or more people on each team.

Because of one of my listeners, I don't know who this person is, but I know they spent roughly two and a half hours of their life listening to me talk about stuff. So their home turf got bumped up on the list. You are coming, Bangladesh. I see you.

Being able to get my content out to listeners that I may have never met in 112 countries and counting is objectively cool as far as I'm concerned.

h the Republic as far back as: 1979

That is a pretty good reason for me to tell you about Mari Kavaran, or in English, the Eastern sun.

Iranian food is not something that I have specifically eaten, but I am a fan of a kebab meat or most kinds of vegetables and that features heavily in Iranian food.

The national dish is called gourmet sabzi and it is not a kebab, but it is a thing you may have eaten a variation of because it's an herb heavy beef, bean and meat stew. It's one of those dishes that generally does not work in a commercial setting because it's super labor and time intensive and sensitive to timing.

So I'm going to go get a cooking fire going while you listen to an anthem. Enjoy. Sam. My initial reaction is a bit of relief here actually.

I was running a risk by picking two fairly authoritarian Islamic countries in a row and sort of expected this to be another hymn. There are notes of that in this song and it's also very short, but it sounds much closer to an anthem than I thought it was going to.

There is a suggestion of a march and a sense of celebration or proclamation to it. I think it sounds alright, even though this one is not going to make my regular playlist.

We'll get back to the song in a couple of minutes as we generally do. For now, I want to talk about old places. Why? Maybe it is because there are not really any super old places in the US that are from the US.

I mean like my house is more than 220 years old, but that is a pittance compared to the span of human history and the part of human history that has occurred in the place where this building is in Iran, which I will occasionally call Persia. Should I ever find myself there, I would go see the ancient city of Persepolis.

It served as the ceremonial capital of Cyrus the Great's Persian empire and was a major center from 55 to 33 BCE when the city was burned to the ground by Alexander the Great. He did that a lot.

The oddest thing to me anyway about this place is that it appears to have been a seasonally occupied ceremonial palace of massive scale rather than an actual city proper. Either way, it has incredible architecture and archaeology that can be found nowhere else on the planet. What's left of it anyway.

So how did we get to this UNESCO Heritage site?

I know I say this a lot, but Iran should not be hard for us to find because we were very close to the place when we visited the UAE a ways back back to get there we went north from Madagascar, the large island to the west of Africa's mainland, past the coast of Oman on the Arabian Sea and if we keep going into the Persian Gulf, we have reached the southern shores of Iran that are actually north of the Emirates and across the Gulf, the southern border of the country is all Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Amman with the eastern neighbors of from south to north are Pakistan, Afghanistan and some of Turkmenistan. The Western border south to north is Iraq and Turkey, with the north rounded out with Armenia, Azerbaijan, the Caspian Sea and again Turkmenistan.

The nearly 92 million people there enjoy slightly over 636,000 square miles of space, which is over 1.6 million kilometers square kilometers, making it the 17th largest country in both categories.

It is seismically active with a iverse climate, getting 7.0 magnitude earthquakes at least once a decade and a choice of climates from arid and desert like to semi tropical forests to ski areas up in the mountains.

me to the Lut desert where in: 2005

For today's geology diversion, we are back to regular geology again and we're going to talk about salt domes a little bit. I just read about them for the first time and these things are fascinating stuff.

They begin with depositing a lot of salt in a restricted basin, generally via evaporation of water, which contains salt.

Over more geological time, sediment is deposited on top of said salt and then the stuff gets pushed up and flows out in a combination of differential loading and passive diaperism.

Those are two processes that sound interesting and awesome to read about, but they're also crazy complicated, so I'm going to have to settle for not actually knowing anything about them for the time being.

But they make domes the size of mountains made out of salt, and that can even result in something called the Salt Glacier, which sounds actually kind of scary. There are a bunch of these things in the Zagros Mountains in Iran, more than 130 of them, and they're stunning looking stuff.

The most striking looking one that I have found pictures of is the Jashak Salt Dome. And it's basically a multicolored mountain that probably tastes awesome, or at least that's the assumption that I choose to make.

And the hill that I will die on, they've been there for a long time, but so is Persia. So let's get to the timeline. Sometimes I read about countries that have very little historical information about them.

Sometimes they're in Africa and they have a very long timeline available. And this time we have one of the countries with a very detailed historical record that is pretty long.

All of these things make it difficult where to decide to start. The narrative sort of the fact that we're focused on the anthem of the country and its Story helps me dial it in pretty much all of the time.

Here we are going to kick it off at the beginning of the Qahar dynasty in the dawn of the early modern period.

In: 1796

he wrap up of the conflict in: 1834

Following these losses, there was a corresponding major demographic shift wherein large groups of Muslim people fled the Russian occupied territory to mainland Iran.

Plenty of Christians fled as well though, because being subjugated by the Russian Empire was an event that a whole bunch of people wanted absolutely nothing to do with. The trend of mostly Muslim flight from the formerly Persian region continued into the early 20th century.

All of this migration did two main things, both affecting Iranian politics, economics and culture as shifting peoples rehashed the ethnic distribution of the peninsula.

The first was because of the mass expulsion of Caucasian Muslims from the caucus regions Persia lost plus the people that chose to flee rather than live under the part of the Eastern Orthodox Russian Empire.

The second is because part of the resulting treaty from the wars allowed for Russia to resettle the dispersed Armenian people after hundreds of years of Russian majority.

I don't know if that will figure into the story of the Armenian anthem, but I have a strong suspicion that we will hear about this period from another perspective someday. During this war and subsequent demographic change, there was an increase in diplomacy with the west in general and some modernization.

as also the Persian Famine of: 1870

The Shah did manage to stay in power through the tumult by transitioning the country essentially into a constitutional monarchy with important and complicated differences between from what a Westerner would think of that, but we're going to skip those things.

What followed from there was a period of intense but often superficial and poorly considered modernization efforts that started with the reign of Reza Shah. He brought in a secular authoritarian government with schools, trains, buses, radios and the telephone.

But it was opposed hard by the powerful clergy in Iran along with other people there that didn't like living in an authoritarian police state. There was enough tension that when the government banned the hijab, there were very beginnings of rebellion.

And if not for the start of World War II, we might be hearing a very different story here. What did happen, though, is that the Shah mistakenly thought that Hitler was going to win and he refused to cooperate with the Allies.

That was enough for Britain and Russia to roll in and occupy the region. As I have said before, they went in to stabilize the situation.

That is a very broad explanation of the Iran that the poet and the composer were born into.

When we get back to the timeline, it will be somewhere else and as I write this, I am not sure what time that will be in, so we're going to learn that together in a little bit.

ulgari, our poet, was born in: 1939

There are sporadic sources on him that conflict with each other so wildly that it's hard to accurately say a ton about this guy in 82. He does come more clearly into the historical focus once he joins the Jose Hanari.

irst collection of poetry. In: 1989

This was around the time that he penned the words of the Iranian anthem. More on that in a bit.

partment of Music and song in: 1995

As I write this in October of: 2025

sic from Temple University in: 1980

He returned to Iran in 81 and joined the faculty at Shiraz University. The timeline, for once things happened in the rest of Hassan's life is another infuriatingly vague thing that I've encountered here.

A bunch of it is due to language limitations because 90% of what I'm reading about this man is right click and translate or an image of a book that I'm reading with Google lens translating through my phone camera.

That and I need to learn something about the Islamic dating system and how it relates to the Julian calendar that rules my life before I cover another Islamic country. Because right now it's just confusing me. Frustrating stuff for sure.

But please correct me if I get things wrong and I'll actually get to have a correction episode or something. Anyway, I can say some things about Hasan for sure.

ian Television and radio from: 1988

for sure that as recently as: 2008

After World War II there was a brief occupation by Soviet Russia, but that had no real lasting effect on the country.

What did matter a great deal was the nationalization of British owned oil industry which happened despite some severe sanctions and a classic British naval blockade. It mattered, but we're going to skip it.

And the brief flirtation with constitutional monarchy because once Britain was out of there and the Shah was in a moment of political weakness, the US swept in and did another classic thing. The CIA instigated coup, the Prime Minister was forced out of office and the country was ruled as a full US backed autocracy.

Definitely not a thing they told me in history class.

f oil. And then In January of: 1978

st of: 1979

ing to jump about a decade to: 1989

That is just after the Iran Iraq war, a bloody and complicated conflict that I do not have to mention further, when Ayatollah Khomeini died and the reign of Ayatollah Kaminai began, which is essentially where we exit the timeline, although it is another decade before we actually get Marie K' Varan as the anthem. That happened with a contest that was held to replace the revolutionary anthem with something to honor the 10th anniversary of Khomeini's death.

I don't know how many pieces of music were submitted, but obviously we know which one won the contest.

There were 10 or 12 poems composed by the poets of the Supreme Council for the Iranian Broadcasting Company were prepared based on the melody that won. And again, we know what the unanimously picked choice was.

The poet said in an interview that there were 11 criteria, that the poets all met and recited their parts, and that the parts were selected from both of the pieces he entered. I'd love to know more about that specifically, and the search does in fact always continue.

But for now, and with that, we have our anthem and I can go on to discuss the song itself. Musically speaking, we're looking at a composition that sits right at the intersection of Western orchestral scores and Persian modal music.

Listener I spent hours reading about Persian modal music and I think I will have to read about that for another year before I understand the stuff. The general idea is that a mode in this anthem, it's Das Ta I Mahar, is essentially a collection of melodies that are pieced together into a song.

This is probably simple, like, well, duh stuff if you know more about music than me, but I will learn more in order to get you better information. In the case of Mary Kvaran, it roughly corresponds to a Western major scale with microtonal wiggling room. This song is in common time.

It has a stately tempo and is in ternary form. I just learned about that too. It means that the music is three sections, with the first and last being similar.

This is a piece that made distinctly Iranian through the use of parallel motion and droning tones, which I enjoy because I like the anthem to reflect the culture that it is from.

We get a solemn yet uplifting tune that was originally composed for brass, strings and percussion, but as it is a national anthem, you can find it played in many different ways lyrically. Like I said earlier on, we have a fairly short affair and this is a deliberate choice on the part of the Iranian government.

They wanted an anthem that could be performed in full because they thought that a partial go was disrespectful.

This piece is a deliberate reflection of traditional Persian Islamic poetry, constructed with a fairly tight rubric that is trying to have moral authority and cultural depth.

It is written for a theocratic Islamic country and as I frequently say here, national anthems are by their very nature objects of nationalism through and through. As such, it follows a set of rules and norms that I am not well acquainted with because I'm not Iranian.

I've learned some of the stuff about the writing I'll be sharing with you in a few, but that does not give me the time it takes to learn how to be a person that understands Persian poetry. This is just me getting lost considering the variabilities in the lived experience of humanity and veering off into the weeds.

So anyway, I shall correct course and tell you that the pieces written in Farsi and the history of Farsi versus Arabic is in itself another thing that I spent way too much time reading about. So another Anyway, on to the read through. From the horizon rose the sun of the Far east, the light of the eyes of those who believe in truth.

Baman is the splendor of our faith. Your message, O Imam, Independence, Freedom is imprinted on our souls. Martyrs, your cry has echoed in the ear of time.

May you live and be eternal the Islamic Republic of Iran.

In keeping with the general theme of Persian history, there is a ton of information out there on this anthem and the writing, even if the poet and the composer still suffer from regular person syndrome. We're used to that second part, but the first part lets me unpack the seemingly simple eight lines in a bit of detail.

It's only simple to someone that is not Iranian, though, because if you were born and raised in that culture, you will understand this in a deep and contextual way. This is a modern, revolutionary poem praising the Ayatollah and drawing upon Persian Islamic poetry traditions.

It starts right in the opening, with the sun rising in the east, an archetypal metaphor for divine revelation. In that tradition, the Quran is chock full of light symbolism, and Persian mysticism frequently equates dawn to a spiritual awakening.

This is a deeply religious anthem and uses the contrasting motifs of something called didactic Sufi inflected verse. It's a kind of poetry that is also designed to teach you an Islamic principle grounded in moral or divine struggle and not in material concern.

The poet explicitly elevates the praise for the leader by using a literary device called casita that kind of blends devotional poetry and political rhetoric.

Very nationalistic stuff, actually, it sort of implicitly elevates the Supreme Leader to sainthood, even though it is not explicitly stated in the song. The next bit is a little limited in scope and honestly kind of a stretch for my western brain, I guess, but the sources have aligned here.

But there is distinctly some Persian rhetorical balance that is an echo of the Arabic sermon cadence. What does that mean?

Like all the other historical nuance that was put into this very short verse that is similarly reduced to an almost propaganda level distillation of what's going on that continues with the reference to martyrs and elevating them into permanent metaphysical aspect through a type of elegiac moshaic verse. And because the martyr's voice never dies, it's a little thing.

But by having 11 requirements in something that has to be in such a short, short package, it turns this not widely penetrable thing that may lack wide appeal into an even less penetrable thing that definitely lacks wide appeal.

So as an anthem, upon understanding it more thoroughly and looking past just the sound of it, it this is not one that checks many of my boxes for sure.

It fits the nation though, and a blend of mysticism and nationalism tinged with some very careful adulation of an authoritarian political and spiritual figure is exactly what the government of Iran wanted in this anthem.

Despite all that, I like the song because my checklists are arbitrary things that an increasingly confident amateur historian podcast that specializes in national anthems thinks about it, and in the grand scheme they surely mean little to nothing.

What that means for you is that you better have your salt when you listen to me, because even though I do in fact source what I tell you and do my homework here, it is also possible and likely that I have screwed some stuff up. And it also doesn't mean my perspective is the only acceptable one, or that I am an unbiased speaker.

Anyway, anyway, listener, I will catch myself before I digress too far into my stream of consciousness about the meta workings of my learning and writing for the show. That bit of self reflection means that we have in fact made it through to the end of another one of these things.

This episode has shown me that I definitely don't know much about history, and that statement will be probably be true for all of the time that I'm alive, regardless of how much I learn about history. But it sure makes me want to learn more. I hope that you get the itch to learn more as well let's do the credits.

The writing, recording and production for the show are done by me and I wrote and played the theme music. The music was used by me with my permission.

audio from a snippet of a mid-: 1990

Someday I'll have a tick tock or something and I'll post snippets of facts, but I don't have the time for that stuff right now. On Facebook I post about the show and sometimes about national anthem news, but mostly I'm depending on word of mouth for getting this into ears.

That means that I'm asking you to help me by using the hashtag anthemspod. It would be cool if you shared this content and maybe it will lead to Iran.

Figuring out how to scale water consumption with available capacity in a sustainable fashion. Literally dying of thirst should not happen to any human being.

hemspod gmail.com caller text/: 120375

-: 2494

Maybe you have managed to gain control of the sound system at a local church that broadcasts the bells chiming on the hour and instead of letting people know that it's three o', clock, you decide to play this very episode for people miles and miles around.

It's also possible that you just let the bells toll and think to yourself that it would be great if it was a little closer to the end of the workday and also in real time. As I'm recording this, I realize that I might have used that ending before. Somebody let me know.

Either way, I suspect that you're one of the good people because you listen to my show and you have vast appreciation of the way that you've spent some of your time hearing me. I'll see you next month. Sa.

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