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Photographs fron the 1977 British Speleological Expedition to the Zagros Mts, Iran. - Back to index - foward to next image -
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| ...local bread - a very large thin chapati - kept soft by wrapping in a cloth then in polythene sheet ! ( ah, plastic sheet - so useful ). Baked in the villages on stones, on fires fuelled with their own excrement, plus mule droppings, pat-a-caked into flat cont below. |
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shapes and dried in the sun ! Their other food, at least on the mountain, seemed to be tomatoes - but they only came up with their mules, so might have eaten in the village half way. I'm really not sure how any of them survived. They had their goat herds and probably fowls in the village - the women and girls would make Persian carpets by hand, hanging on wood in their clay houses further down the mountain. All the young girls would be constantly spinning wool on bob weight - ( this entire area reminded me of Sunday School ! it's all truly 'Biblical ' ) , they would dye it with local dyes, then hand knot it. So that would be a source of a megre income. Also, they seemed to collect some kind of resin from a certain scrubby bush on the mountain, slitting it, then returning to collect the dried sap - Mhyrh ?, Gum Arabic ? not sure. A privilage to have spent some time with them. Geoff Richings - Iran 77 * |