Last Updated, 8:04 p.m. As my colleague Thomas Erdbrink reports, shopkeepers in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar closed their doors on Wednesday, after a protest by foreign-currency traders nearby was attacked by the security forces. The protests came as pressure from international sanctions caused a sudden plunge in the value of Iran’s currency, the rial, which has in turn played havoc with the buying and selling of foreign currency, angering merchants and the capital’s black-market money-changers, who work along Ferdowsi Avenue in central Tehran.

Iranian journalists and bloggers working from outside the country shared video and photographs posted online by people who said they witnessed Wednesday’s protests in Tehran’s commercial center.

A reporter for the BBC’s Persian-language service, Rana Rahimpour, pointed to video uploaded to YouTube on Wednesday morning, showing protesters marching into the bazaar, chanting, “Dignified merchants, support us, support us.”

Ms. Rahimpour also directed her Twitter followers to a second video clip, uploaded to an Iranian opposition YouTube channel that collected images of protests in 2009. That video, apparently shot after the protesters entered the bazaar, showed them repeating their call for the merchants to join them by closing their shops.

Video uploaded later to the same opposition YouTube channel showed the shutters pulled down on many of the stalls in the bazaar.

Saeed Valadbaygi, an opposition blogger and journalist now based in Toronto, posted a link to video of people milling about outside the entrance the bazaar, said to have been recorded after the shopkeepers closed down.

As the Iranian-American sociologist Kevan Harris explains in The Iran Primer, “Iranian bazaars, especially Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, have played central roles in the economic and political history of the country.” During the last years of the Shah’s rule, Mr. Harris notes, “Bazaaris participated in and supported protests and demonstrations in the spring of 1977, well before most social groups — including the clergy — had joined the revolutionary surge.”

Noting that the merchant class failed to join the wave of protests that followed the disputed presidential election in 2009, Mr. Harris observes:

The absence of bazaari activity during the Green Movement demonstrations of June and July 2009 indicates that broader links between the bazaar as a social entity and democratic social movements in Iran have not developed. This is perhaps because bazaars today seldom exhibit the collective identity and public solidarity that occurred in past moments of Iranian political history. This stems partially from the new cleavages in bazaar networks that resulted from the Islamic Republic’s management of the economy and the picking of politically subservient economic winners. However, it also derives from significant changes in relations between the bazaar and the global economy.

The scale of Wednesday’s protests remained unclear, even to some journalists in Tehran who did not witness the demonstrations and were unable to say for certain if video posted online showing large numbers of protesters on the streets was new or simply recycled from previous demonstrations by activists who wanted to magnify the importance of the new demonstrations.

Mr. Valadbaygi also drew attention to one of the clips that was in doubt: video showing a large crowd of protesters marching past the distinctive facade of the Bank Melli building in front of the bazaar.

Although Iranian opposition bloggers have occasionally misidentified images in the past, pointing to video or photographs shot at previous demonstrations as if they were evidence of new protests, several clips uploaded on Wednesday seemed to match accounts of events by witnesses and looked new to journalists who follow Iran closely.

One reason is that photographs showed protests and clashes in parts of the capital where even the official media reported demonstrations; another is that some of the video clips included chants against the government’s support for Syria, which was not an issue in 2009, when street protests were common. (That said, audio is easily manipulated and The Lede would be glad to hear from any readers who might have evidence that any of the clip featured in this post was recorded at a previous protest.)

Golnaz Esfandiari, who edits the blog Persian Letters from Washington, drew attention to video of the protesters chanting, “Leave Syria alone, think of us!” a reference to the government’s support for the Syrian government despite economic difficulties at home.

What appears to be more video of that same scene, recorded at about the same time, but from the reverse angle, indicates that the protesters were marching out of Imam Khomeini Square, north of the bazaar, along Ferdowsi Avenue. The large telecommunications building located at the southern end of that square can be seen in the background of both clips, but more clearly in the second one.

As Reuters reports, the opposition news site Kaleme said the protests began around the bazaar and then spread north to Imam Khomeini Square and Ferdowsi Avenue. The semiofficial Mehr News Agency reports that the security forces dispersed protests on Ferdowsi Avenue and in Imam Khomeini Square.



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Another clip uploaded by an Iranian blogger and verified by a witness to the protest, showed a large number of demonstrators on Ferdowsi Avenue also chanting for the government to disengage from Syria and take care of problems at home.

One of the most striking clips (embedded at the very top of this post), showed a large number of protesters angrily shouting “interest takers” outside a branch of Saderat Bank, which deals in foreign currency exchange and has a branch on Ferdowsi Avenue, and also featured the chant “Death to Syria.”

On the question of authenticity, and whether any of these clips might have been recorded in 2009, one reader of The Lede who is in Iran makes an interesting point. It appears that all or almost all of the protesters seen in the video and photographs bearing today’s date are men. That seems to fit with a protest like Wednesday’s, led by money-changers and merchants, but would have been unusual in 2009 when women were very much in evidence.

Earlier in the day, Bahman Kalbasi, who reports for the BBC from New York, drew attention to a photograph of protesters posted on Twitter by a blogger named Ali Soltani that appeared to show a march along Manoucheri Street, off Ferdowsi, where the black-market trade in foreign currency proliferates and clashes were reported on Wednesday.

More pics from Tehran, it says: “Manucheheri St. , 2 hours ago” RT @khorshid: RT: @Alieko خيابان منوچهري؛ دو ساعت پيش //t.co/wSIUkbBZ — Bahman Kalbasi (@BahmanKalbasi) 3 Oct 12

In response to a question from another Twitter user, about a second image he posted online of burning debris behind the marchers, Mr. Soltani wrote that “our house located adjacent to Manouchehri Street, and this photo has been taken by my friend.”

Mr. Valadbaygi posted a photograph on TwitPic, which he said was shot on Wednesday as riot police officers ran down Saadi Street, which intersects with Manouchehri, to confront protesters, as smoke billowed from fires or tear gas.

Saeed Valadbaygi, via TwitPic

Saeed Kamali Dehghan, who blogs on Iran from London for The Guardian, pointed to an image surfaced on Twitter by a blogger who writes as @ZealousIranian, of a fire being extinguished on Saadi Street.