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Azadi Tower: The Symbol of Tehran?
An article by:
Pejman Habibi
 Tehran (also spelled
Teheran) is the latest and largest capital
city in the 5000-year history of Persia, as Iran was called by many people
in the West before 1935. A huge bustling city of 8
million , Tehran is situated on the southern slopes of the Alborz
Mountains 100 km to the south of the Caspian Sea. It lies at
a height of about 1,200 metres above sea level.
To the south extends the central plateau of Iran. The name Tehran
is said to derive from the Old Persian teh, “warm,” and ran, “place.”
Tehran is the successor to the ancient
Persian capital of Rayy, which was destroyed by
the Mongols in AD 1220; the village of Tehran
is believed to have been a suburb of Rayy in the 4th century, and after the
fall of Rayy many of the inhabitants moved to Tehran.
When Agha
Mohammad Khan Qajar, the founder of the Ghajar Dynasty, named Tehran his
capital about 200 years ago, it had an estimated population of 15000.
Now, barely two centuries
later,
Tehran has grown into a huge maze of tall and
short buildings, narrow and wide streets, spread over an area of 600
square kilometres, in which the 8 million inhabitants of the city
live, work and move around. It's a melting pot of the poor and the
rich, the religious and the not-so-religious, and the many races that make
up what has come to be known as the Iranian nation, the Fars, the
Kurds, the Turks, the Lors, the Arabs, the Afghans and many more...
 In the western part of this
huge jungle of bricks, concrete and steel, at what used to be the
western entrance to the city, stands Azadi Tower, a 35-year-old structure
which has come to be the symbol of Tehran.
Built
in a
combination of Islamic and Sassanid architectural
styles with an arch which
is said to mirror the Elburz (Alborz) mountain range,
the 45-metre tower is faced with 8000 white stone slabs from
the city of Esfahan
(itself an old capital of Iran), so well-known for the craftsmanship of
its inhabitants. The tower is near
Mehrabad Airport and was opened in 1971.
It was built at the order of
Iran's last king of the Pahlavi Dynasty, Mohammad Reza, known by most
westerners as the "Shah" of Iran, the word Shah meaning King in
Persian. He named the tower and the square surrounding it "Shahyad",
which can be roughly translated into "In the Memory of the King".
Ironically the square turned
into a focal point for anti-regime demonstrations during the 1979
Islamic Revolution, with most of the major anti-Shah rallies
terminating right in Shahyad Square where resolutions were read out
calling for an end to the monarchy and the
establishment of an Islamic Republic.
 Finally
the tower and square were officially renamed Azadi, meaning "liberty" in Persian,
after the toppling of the monarchy.
It may be a good mental exercise to try and find
out why and how Mohammad Reza Shah's ambitions for a modern and
secular Iran that was supposed to revive the long lost glory of the
ancient Persian Empire, turned out to be the futile dreams of a
monarch severely out of touch with reality when the very bricks of the
so-called modern Iran poured into streets in their millions demanding
an Islamic Republic.
In the quest for a better understanding of the
recent history of Iran, "Azadi" Tower, where modernity, Islam and national heritage
were supposed to shake hands, may well hold the clue.
But like it or not, the not-so-majestic Azadi
Tower, a modern structure boasting to marry national heritage and
Islamic culture, has become an integral part of the image of Tehran.
The aesthetic worth of the tower? Well, it's a
matter of taste, I suppose. Personally, I have never liked it. I
find it an anemic pretentious structure, aiming at being everything and predictably
ending up being nothing...
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