Iran - A day in the life of The Silk Road

I was born and raised in Iran. I left Iran in 1976 to pursue graduate education in the USA. Since 2013, I have traveled to Iran multiple times and visited the following cities for this project. Click on each city to see pictures and HERE to watch video clips from these trips.

Here is a short history of Iran according to the Wikipedia:

Iran: Also known as Persia officially the Islamic Republic of Iran since 1980, is a country in Western Asia. The country is bordered on the north by Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan, with Kazakhstan and Russia to the north across the Caspian Sea. Iran is bordered on the east by Afghanistan and Pakistan, on the south by the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, on the west by Iraq and on the northwest by Turkey.

The 18th-largest country in the world in terms of area at 1,648,195 km² (636,372 square miles), Iran is an ethnically diverse country and has a population of around 77 million. It is a mountainous country of particular geopolitical significance owing to its location in three spheres of Asia. Tehran is the capital, the country’s most populous city and the political, cultural, commercial and industrial center of the nation. Iran is a regional power and holds an important position in international energy security and world economy as a result of its large reserves of petroleum and natural gas. Iran has the largest proven natural gas reserves in the world, and the fourth-largest petroleum reserves.

Iran is home to one of the world’s oldest civilizations. The first dynasty in Iran formed during the Elamite kingdom in 2800 BC. The Iranian Medes unified Iran into an empire in 625 BC. Cyrus the Great founded the First Persian Empire, or Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC), which became the largest ancient empire and significantly contributed to both Eastern and Western civilizations. In 633 AD, Muslim armies invaded Iran and had conquered the region by 651 AD. The emergence in 1501 of the Safavid dynasty, which promoted Twelver Shia Islam as the official religion of their empire, marked one of the most important turning points in Iranian and Muslim history. The Persian Constitutional Revolution established the nation’s first parliament in 1906, within a constitutional monarchy. Following a coup d’état instigated by the UK and US in 1953, Iran gradually became a more autocratic country. Growing dissent with foreign influence culminated during the Iranian Revolution which led to the establishment of an Islamic republic on 1 April 1979.