Bakhtiari

Twice a year, for as long as anyone has records, the Bakhtiari have moved their flocks across the Zagros. In spring families leave the winter pastures on the plains of Khuzestan and climb towards the summer grazing of Chaharmahal and the slopes of Zard Kuh; in autumn they come down again. The route crosses snowfields, passes and the cold, fast Karun and its tributaries, and in the past took weeks on foot with sheep, goats, horses and the tents themselves loaded on pack animals. The crossing of the rivers was always the most dangerous moment, and the passes and fords along the way are named in songs that every Bakhtiari child learns.

The Bakhtiari, Bakhtiyāri, speak a variety of Luri and are often counted among the Lurs, the ‘Greater Lur’ of medieval geographers. They regard themselves as a people in their own right. The confederation has two great divisions, the Haft Lang and the Chahar Lang (‘Seven Legs’ and ‘Four Legs’), each made up of many tribes and clans led, until the twentieth century, by powerful khans.

In history

In 1909, during the Constitutional Revolution, Bakhtiari forces under Sardar As’ad and Samsam-ol-Saltaneh marched from Isfahan on Tehran together with fighters from Gilan, helping to depose Mohammad Ali Shah and restore the constitution. A year earlier, in 1908, oil had been struck at Masjed Soleyman, on Bakhtiari land, the first commercial oil find in the Middle East. Under Reza Shah the khans lost much of their power and the tribes were forced to settle. Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiary, the second wife of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, came from a Bakhtiari family.

The outside world first saw the migration in Grass (1925), a silent documentary by Merian C. Cooper, Ernest Schoedsack and Marguerite Harrison, which followed a Bakhtiari tribe over the mountains. Its images of men and animals swimming the Karun on inflated skins are still startling.

What is kept

Bakhtiari rugs, woven in villages of Chaharmahal, are known for the ‘garden’ or panel design, the khesti, a field divided into compartments each holding a tree, vase or flower. Men wear the chugha, a sleeveless woven coat in white with dark vertical bands, and a round black felt hat; women wear full layered skirts and long scarves. Weddings bring the sorna and dohol, the stick-fighting dance chubbazi and the handkerchief dance. Bakhtiari songs keep the names of khans, battles and lovers alive, and the long-necked setar and kamancheh accompany laments.

Today most Bakhtiari live settled lives in Shahrekord, Masjed Soleyman, Izeh, Isfahan and Ahvaz, but some families still make the journey every year, now often by truck for part of the way. Those who do not still speak of yeylaq and qeshlaq, summer and winter quarters, as if the year were still measured in pastures.