Iran's culture: a solar new year and a lunar year of mourning

Who speaks Persian and what else is spoken

Article 15 of the constitution makes Persian, written in its Arabic-derived script, the official language and requires it in official documents and school textbooks; it allows regional and tribal languages in the press and broadcasting and the teaching of their literature in schools. Britannica estimates that slightly more than half of Iranians speak a dialect of Persian and that roughly three quarters speak an Indo-European language of some kind, Kurdish and Luri among them. Roughly a quarter speak a Turkic language, mostly Azerbaijani in the north-west, and Arabic is spoken natively by a small share in Khuzestan and on the Gulf islands.

Persian is old on this ground. The Persian Language article traces the modern language through Middle Persian, the language of the Sasanian state, to the Old Persian of the Achaemenid inscriptions, and dates the first New Persian literature to the ninth century, written in the Perso-Arabic script. Britannica estimates that perhaps a third or more of the Persian lexicon came from Arabic. The monarchy tried to purge Arabic words from the language with little success, and the effort stopped after 1979; Classical Arabic, the language of the Qur'an, is taught in schools and remains the language of religious scholarship.

The same article counts about 130 million Persian speakers worldwide, in Iran, Afghanistan, where the language is called Dari, and Tajikistan, where it is called Tajik and written in Cyrillic. In Iran it is officially Farsi. The Academy of Persian Language and Literature in Tehran prefers "Persian" as the name in foreign languages.

How Shia Islam shapes the public year

Britannica describes the vast majority of Iranians as Twelver Shia Muslims, the branch the constitution names as the official religion. Kurds and Turkmen are mostly Sunni and the Arab minority is both; Article 12 grants the Sunni schools of law full respect and authority over the personal law of their followers. Article 13 recognises Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians as the only religious minorities. The Baha'i faith is not among them, and a group of UN experts in 2022 urged Iran to stop what it called the systematic persecution of religious minorities, including Baha'is barred from universities.

The mourning calendar is built around the death of Husayn ibn Ali, the third imam, killed with his family and followers at Karbala in 680 by the troops of the Umayyad caliph Yazid. Each year at Ashura the death is re-enacted in ta'zieh, a passion play inscribed by UNESCO as intangible heritage in 2010, and mourned with rituals of self-flagellation, with bare hands and sometimes with chains. Through the rest of the year storytellers recount the martyrdom in rawzeh-khani sessions, often in a hosseiniyeh, a hall built for mourning. Britannica writes that no religious ceremony is complete without a reference to Karbala.

Joy has its own days. Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha are kept as in other Muslim countries, and on the birthday of the twelfth imam, whose return the Shia await, cities are lit and the bazaars decorated. Armenian Christians keep their own pilgrimage: the gathering at the monastery of St Thaddeus was inscribed by UNESCO in 2020, and three Armenian monastic ensembles were listed as World Heritage in 2008.

How Nowruz and the older festivals are kept

The solar year begins at the vernal equinox. The official calendar, the Solar Hijri, follows the sun but shares its starting point with the lunar Islamic calendar. Britannica describes the Nowruz celebration as beginning on the last Wednesday of the old year, followed by a holiday of about a week, and ending on the thirteenth day of the new year, Sizdah Bedar, when families picnic in the countryside. UNESCO lists Nowruz as heritage shared among the countries that keep it, most recently extended in 2024, and marks 21 March as the International Day of Nowruz.

Other seasonal festivals have been inscribed in the same decade. Yalda, the longest night of the year, was listed in 2022 jointly as Yalda/Chella, Sadeh followed in 2023 and the ceremony of Mehregan in 2024.

Which poets Iranians still read

Britannica dates Persian literature in its present form to the ninth century and names Ferdowsi, Nezami, Hafez, Jami and Rumi as the masters who still shape Iranian writing; the Persian Language article adds Saadi and Omar Khayyam, and Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, the national epic in verse. The tomb of Hafez in Shiraz is set in gardens. Britannica notes that conservative clerics have judged many classical works licentious, which has made their publication and distribution difficult at times.

Modern prose and poetry became a medium for dissent. Britannica names the writers Sadeq Hedayat, Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Sadeq Chubak and the poets Ahmad Shamlu and Forough Farrokhzad. After 1979 many writers left the country and much of the best Persian writing was published abroad, while a feminist literature grew at home with authors such as Shahrnoush Parsipour and Moniru Ravanipur.

Stories are also performed aloud. Naqqali, Iranian dramatic storytelling, has been on UNESCO's list of heritage in need of urgent safeguarding since 2011.

What Iranian film and music have worked under

Britannica calls cinema the most popular form of entertainment in the country and an important medium for social commentary. The revolutionary government at first banned film-making and then funded directors who would promote Islamic values; audiences stayed away, and by the 1990s directors such as Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Bahram Beyzai and Dariush Mehrjui were winning prizes at Cannes and Locarno. Women directors followed, among them Rakhshan Bani-Etemad with Blue Scarf in 1995 and Tahmineh Milani with Two Women in 1999. Films about children, such as The White Balloon of 1995 and Children of Heaven of 1997, became a recognised strand.

Music has had a harder path. A conservatory was founded in Tehran only in the twentieth century, and in 1979 the restrictions on studying and performing music were restored. Folk songs and classical Persian music were passed on orally from one generation to the next, and UNESCO inscribed the radif of Iranian music in 2009. Western pop remained officially forbidden even after the reforms of the late 1990s and circulated anyway. Googoosh, a leading singer of the years before the revolution, was allowed in 2000 to resume her career from abroad after 21 years of silence. Instrument-making traditions for the kamancheh, the dotar, the oud and the rubab were inscribed between 2017 and 2024.

Where the country's crafts are made

Carpet looms are spread across the country, and each centre gives its name to a design: Kashan, Kerman, Khorasan, Isfahan, Shiraz, Tabriz and Qom. Metalwork has its own map in Britannica's account: gold in Tehran, silver in Shiraz, Isfahan and Zanjan, copper in Kashan and Isfahan, turquoise in Khorasan and pearls on the Gulf. Hand-made tiles and mosaics are still produced beside machine-made ones, and in 2025 UNESCO inscribed ayeneh-kari, the art of mirror-work in Persian architecture.

Persian miniature painting, which reached refinement in the Jalayirid, Shiraz and Isfahan schools, had largely died out by the early eighteenth century, Britannica records, while calligraphy and illumination carried on. The Pahlavi state built in two directions at once, imitating Western styles and reviving Iranian ones; the Shahyad tower in Tehran, completed in 1971 for the 2,500th anniversary of the Achaemenid dynasty, was renamed Azadi, "freedom", after the revolution. Golestan Palace, opened as a museum in 1894, and the National Museum of Iran, of 1937, hold the older collections.

The garden is the craft that joins water and building. UNESCO's description of the Persian Garden traces its principles to the time of Cyrus in the sixth century BC: a plot divided into four, with water channels for irrigation and ornament, conceived as an image of Eden and of the four Zoroastrian elements of sky, earth, water and plants.

How sport became a public stage

Britannica names wrestling, horse racing and the ritual bodybuilding of the zurkhaneh, the "house of strength", as the country's traditional sports, and UNESCO inscribed the pahlevani and zurkhaneh rituals in 2010. The Culture of Iran article describes the movements of the zurkhaneh as close to dance and to martial training at once. Polo descends from the horse games of the Iranian tribes; it became associated with the monarchy and was played discreetly after 1979, and UNESCO inscribed chogan, the game played to music and storytelling, in 2017.

Football is the game with the largest following. The national team won the Asian championship in 1968, 1974 and 1976 and first played at the World Cup in 1978. Britannica records that the revolution set sport back: the new government saw the stadium as a rival to the mosque, nationalised the major teams and kept women out of many activities, and the war with Iraq left little money for it. A revival began in the 1990s, women's sport included. Iran first sent athletes to the Olympic Games in 1948, and most of its medals have come in weightlifting, martial arts and wrestling. Britannica adds that major sporting events have repeatedly turned into mass street celebrations in which young men and women voiced a wish for reform.

What the state allows in print and in public

Newspapers must be licensed under the press law of 1979, anti-Muslim content is forbidden, and the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance runs the national news agency, IRNA. Radio and television are state broadcasters. Satellite dishes were banned in 1995, a ban Britannica describes as irregularly enforced, and many households watch Persian-language channels from abroad. Print journals carried the reform movement of the late 1990s; in the 2000s opposition moved to the internet and the state answered with blocking and shutdowns, including the nationwide blackout during the protests of January 2026.

Public dress has been regulated since 1979, when revolutionary committees began enforcing Islamic codes of dress and behaviour, and the Culture of Iran article lists mandatory hijab among the restrictions placed on women. The same article records that women made up 65% of university students in 2005, and that Shirin Ebadi, who had been a judge under the monarchy, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003. In September 2022 the death of Mahsa Amini in the custody of the morality police, the Guidance Patrol, set off the protests known as the "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement.

What goes on the Iranian table

Britannica describes Persian cooking as shaped by the country's own produce, with rice as the staple and lamb in almost every meal. Onions go into nearly every dish, and yogurt, milk and cheese come from a long tradition of herding. The typical preparations are simple: khoresh, a stew, and kebabs. Saffron is the signature spice, with lime, mint, turmeric and rosewater, and pomegranates and walnuts are common.

Bread crosses borders. UNESCO inscribed the culture of making and sharing flatbread, listed jointly under the names lavash, katyrma, jupka and yufka, in 2016, and iftar, the meal that breaks the daily fast in Ramadan, with its social traditions in 2023.