A vanishing paradise: along Iran's Khalkhal-Asalem Road

Guardian

On a recent day in Loomavesht, a village up the Asalem-Khalkal road in north Iran’s Gilan province, the men shear sheep, and the women clean the wool. A cool mist fills the air, and soon the cold weather will drive most of the villagers and their livestock down the Alborz mountains to live out the winter. During yehlagh, the old Persian name for the warm season, shepherds live here in small huts set into the rolling slopes like mushrooms, but new-fangled vacation villas tell of an approaching development boom. Up the hill, the foundations of a concrete compound commissioned by an Isfahan businessman jut out of the ground at right angles.

“Show your films Miss, show them what our village was like before the people of Tehran and Isfahan took over,” a young man tells a filmmaker who has made a series of movies here in the past decade. “Those films are proof of what this place used to look like.”

Miles from the Caspian Sea, Loomavesht is sometimes called “heaven on earth” for its bucolic charm. In the morning, cows graze by the roadside, and donkeys are a favoured mode of transport. Filmmakers like Ali Mohammad Ghassemi, Mehrdad Oskooie and Mohammad Ali Talebi worked in the area for the last two decades, and it is from their work that many heard for the first time of the traditional dress worn by the women of Talesh, of the scenic landscapes of the Asalem-Khalkhal trail. But as improved connections to the capital lure visitors to the area, Loomavesht locals are forced to make space for modernity.

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