Lurs

The Lurs, Lor in their own speech, live in the folded ranges of the central and southern Zagros: Lorestan around Khorramabad and Borujerd, Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad, the Mamasani district of Fars, and parts of Ilam, Khuzestan and Hamadan. The Bakhtiari, whose story has its own entry, are often counted among them, and many Bakhtiari and Lurs see each other as close kin while keeping separate names.

Language

Luri is a south-western Iranian language, which makes it a near relation of Persian rather than of Kurdish, although Lurs and southern Kurds have lived side by side for centuries. Linguists usually divide it into Northern Luri, spoken in Lorestan; Bakhtiari; and Southern Luri, spoken in Kohgiluyeh, Boyer-Ahmad and Mamasani. Whether Laki, spoken around Kuhdasht and Nurabad, belongs with Luri or with Kurdish is a debate its own speakers do not all settle the same way.

Bronze and stone

Lorestan has given its name to one of the most recognisable bodies of ancient art in Iran: the Luristan bronzes, cast horse bits, finials and weapons of the early first millennium BCE, with goats, lions and twisted heroic figures. Above Khorramabad stands Falak-ol-Aflak, a fortress with Sasanian origins rebuilt over the centuries. In the Middle Ages local dynasties ruled the two Lurs: the Hazaraspid atabegs of Greater Lur, from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, and the atabegs of Lesser Lur, who held on until the end of the sixteenth.

What is kept

For much of their history many Lurs lived by kuch, the seasonal migration between winter pastures in the low, warm country (garmsir) and summer pastures high in the mountains (sardsir), carrying black tents woven from goat hair. Reza Shah’s forced settlement of the tribes in the 1930s, known as takhte-qapu, broke much of that life by force, and today most Lurs live in villages and towns. The migration survives in some families, and in the memory of all.

Lur music is one of the glories of the Zagros: the sorna and dohol at weddings, the kamancheh in quieter hours, and laments for the dead sung by women. The handkerchief dance, dastmal-bazi, sweeps whole villages into a line. Lur hospitality is proverbial in Iran, and so is a certain directness of speech. Many Lurs hear their own speech in the quatrains of Baba Taher of Hamadan, though Kurds and others claim him too, and the claim of each is part of his charm. Most Lurs are Shia Muslims, and Muharram is marked with mud-smeared mourning (gel-mali) in Khorramabad, a rite that draws visitors from across Iran. Lur dress, the men’s felt hats and the women’s long colourful dresses and scarves, still appears at weddings and Nowruz, when families from Tehran return to the mountains.