Tehran — 4 Years In

By the second year, I had stopped comparing Tehran to everywhere else. I discovered that the city’s true geography is not found on a map of streets and districts—Vanak, Tajrish, Shahr-e Rey—but in the hidden courtyards behind crumbling walls. I befriended a retired philosophy professor in the alleyways of the Grand Bazaar who brewed tea so dark it looked like regret. He told me, “You have not seen Tehran until you have seen it at 2 a.m., when the morality is gone and only the poetry remains.” He was right. The late-night drives along Sadr Highway, with the Alborz mountains glowing like ghosts under a sliver of moon, are the memories I hoard.

The third year broke something in me. Living under sanctions is not a political abstraction; it is a physical exhaustion. It is watching your friends calculate whether a new pair of shoes is worth three months of saved salary. It is the sound of the rial crumbling, a slow, daily avalanche. Yet, it was also the year I witnessed the most extraordinary intimacy. When inflation spiked, my landlady brought me a plate of tahdig —the crispy rice crust that is the crown jewel of Persian cooking—simply because “eating alone in hard times is an insult to God.” In Tehran, hardship does not make people cold; it makes them ferociously hospitable. 4 Years In Tehran

They say that Tehran is a city that does not reveal itself easily. I learned this truth the hard way, over four years that stretched and compressed like the elastic bands my neighbor used to tie her morning sangak bread. Coming from the organized grid of a European capital, I arrived expecting chaos. What I found instead was a labyrinth of unspoken rules, breathtaking resilience, and a pulse that beats louder than the mountains surrounding it. By the second year, I had stopped comparing

I boarded my flight with my passport full of bent pages and my lungs full of that thin, defiant air. I had come looking for a city. I left having lived inside a condition. Four years in Tehran taught me that home is not a place where you are comfortable. It is a place where you learn, against all evidence, to keep breathing. He told me, “You have not seen Tehran

The first year was a lesson in altitude and silence. At 1,600 meters above sea level, the air in Tehran is thin, and so is the patience for foreigners who ask the wrong questions. I remember standing in a crowded Sarbazi (military service) queue, fumbling with my papers while a kind-eyed clerk whispered, “Speed is not our custom, but precision is.” That year, I learned to read the weather not by the sky—often a pale, dusty white—but by the faces of the mothers walking their children to school. A clear, crisp day meant joy; a yellow haze meant asthma and anxiety.

The fourth year was about letting go. I stopped trying to understand the morality police’s ever-shifting gaze or the logic of the traffic that turns a three-kilometer commute into a two-hour meditation on mortality. I learned to love the Bogzar (the uniquely Persian “let it pass” shrug). I learned to love the sound of the azaan echoing off the graffiti-painted walls of former embassies. And I learned to hate the departures—the endless farewell parties at cafes as friends took one-way flights to Istanbul, never to return.

On my last morning, I took a walk up to Darband. The snow had just fallen on Tochal Peak. A young man selling fresh faloodeh smiled and asked where I was from. When I said “Away,” he nodded. “We are all from away now,” he replied. “Tehran is not a place to stay. It is a place to survive. And if you are lucky, a place to be changed forever.”