In Yazd, a city in central Iran, my uncle has gifted me his company’s driver - the jolly, talkative Mr Salimi. But Mr Salimi isn’t just a driver. He’s a one-man tour office, event organiser and historian. When he sets an agenda, you must follow.

The first day, after a trek to the Zoroastrian Atashkadeh (fire temple), the bazaar and mosques of this old desert city, I am ready to go home and take a long nap. But he won’t have any of it. “You said you wanted to see Yazd’s old neighbourhoods," he says. “We should spend the afternoon walking in the old quarters of the city.”

And so we do. And later, I’m glad we did. After hours of roaming those ancient sleepy streets, they are etched into my mind.

Today, my aunt and I want to head to Meybod for the city’s growing tile industry and a visit to Iran’s tile expo for which people have flown in from Italy, Spain and China. Mr Salimi has a different idea. “You seem to like old neighbourhoods and old things," he says. “I have a suggestion, let’s go to the village of Kharanagh instead. It’s beautiful.”

I’m not so sure whether I trust Mr Salimi’s judgement. “Old” alone doesn’t qualify a place as interesting to me. There has to be history to a place that you can trace and feel. But why not? I think to myself. There’s always another day for Meybod. And so we set off to Kharanagh, this village I’ve never heard of before. It's located 85 km northeast of Yazd, the capital of the province. I ask about the name.



Mr Salimi laughs, which suggests he doesn’t really know the answer. He gives me an anecdote that has replaced the history. “I heard that the donkeys (khar) in that village whine a lot (negh).” And so it became the village of “the donkey that whines” - Kharanagh.

Photograph: Tehran Bureau Photograph: Tehran Bureau

I sleep most of the way, as Mr Salimi drives through mile after mile of red sand, hills and mountains. When we get to Kharanagh and park the car, all I see is a long brick wall, recently built, identical to any wall you would see in Yazd at new apartment buildings. “We came,” I wonder, “for this?“

But Mr Salimi leads the way. We walk along the wall, and pass a stream running across what looks like a village square. A few minutes later, the old village comes in full view.

It’s magnificent. Tiny ancient adobe houses are neatly aligned in circles. It’s like the land of Munchkins, only in an Iranian desert. We start circling up and down. The architecture is unlike anything I’ve seen in other villages - it’s like a miniature of the old neighbourhoods of Yazd that we saw the day before: domed roofs and building material the colour of clay, echoing the desert terrains of Yazd. The wind catchers, which look to me like watchtowers, serve as the home’s ventilation system. But the size and function of everything has been vastly reduced to the scale of a little village.

All the houses have “parking” spaces at the bottom, as Mr Salimi calls it, which is more to keep sheep at night. The living quarters are above. There is a village mosque, and a village bathhouse. The house of the Kadkhoda (the village elder) is a tad bigger, but made in the same style. Everything that remains tells you this was once a lively, thriving village. But night turns into day…now it lies in ruins.

All across Iran, I have seen this before, as villagers leave for the city, for work outside the land where generation has followed generation. Some of the villages I grew up around in Khuzestan, south of Iran, are now empty, or changed completely, integrated into municipal units smaller than a county, but larger than a village.

This beautiful but eerie ghost town reminds me of the first novel I read in English - The Village that Slept. In the story, translated from French, two children, Lydia and Franz, find themselves the sole survivors of an unknown accident. They make their way to a deserted village. The despair they feel, I feel today as I roam the ruins of Kharanagh. Doors are left open, old wooden furniture lie in cobwebs. It's as if life came to a grinding halt as a result of an earthquake. As Mr Salimi says, this was an earthquake of a different kind.

Amir Hossein, 5, hugs a newborn lamb. Photograph: Tehran Bureau Photograph: Tehran Bureau

As I circle my way down to the other side, I eventually come across a living creature: a donkey.



I come from a long line of people who worked on the land and grew up with farm animals. Donkeys, sheep and chicken are comfortable, familiar faces. But never before has seeing a donkey made me so happy. I run towards it, and there, deep in a pit, we see an old man. He is wrinkled and bent, but jumps out as soon as he hears us approaching. Village life builds your bones and muscles unlike anything else.

“I’m in my eighties,” the old man says in a sweet accent, deeper than the one spoken in Yazd. “But I don’t know exactly.”



“This is a a really old village,” the old man says. “Before us [the Muslims], the Gooris [Zoarastrians] were here.” According to Ardakan’s tour office, the village has 800 years of recorded history. Other narratives suggest the village is thousands of years old, first settled by Zoroastrians during the Sasanid Empire, a Persian dynasty which lasted from from the 3rd to the 7th century AD.

He has two sons that work in the mines nearby. Two work in Yazd as construction workers, and the rest of his children are in the village. He is trying to dig a new path for the stream to water his farmland. The old village has been deserted, but half a kilometre south, a few of the older villagers have homes.



“Life was good, until my wife died a while ago. Now it’s hard, really hard. Women can live without men, but men are lost without their women.”



We walk back towards the car, and at the stream, a woman is washing clothes, mostly baby clothes. She has the bottom of her chador tied to her neck so it doesn’t get in the way. Every piece of clothing is put in the water, then rubbed with soap and rinsed three times. “My daughter is three and demanding high heels,” she says when I point to a pretty orange dress. She says she has a very old washing machine “that just wrings the clothes a few times. But the water pressure has been too low for the past few weeks. I can’t use it.” She has a wheelbarrow to carry back the wet heavy clothes. I find out she is the granddaughter of the man we just met.

Photograph: Tehran Bureau Photograph: Tehran Bureau

We walk south, away from the old village and towards the new homes the old man told us about. We run into a middle-aged woman in long floral chador. “Excuse me, Miss,” I say. “Do you live here?” I’m not sure how else to start the conversation. She looks at us with big, inquisitive eyes and says hello. She asks if we're visiting from Yazd then invites us to her home. We follow her round a corner and wait a few minutes before we step inside. It's custom when unexpectedly entering an Iranian home to give the host a few minutes to tidy up.

Her house has a sunny yard with a blue fountain in the middle. A flight of stairs lead down to a bathroom and two smaller gardens on each side of the fountain. There is a fig tree “that gives lovely, ripe figs,” she says, and two other trees hanging with dried pomegranates.

Her yard is modest, but very clean. To one side, there is construction material, old jars, broken glass. “This was meant to be renovated,” she says, “but it would cost 5 million tomans [£1,157]. I just don’t have that kind of money.”

Amidst the rubble, I find a trunk. It lies in tatters, but it’s stunning.



The old trunk. Photograph: Tehran Bureau Photograph: Tehran Bureau

“It belonged to my grandmother,” she says when she notices me looking at it. “A couple of visitors have offered to buy it, but I just can’t let it go. It’s all hand embroidered, we used to have people in the village who did that for new brides. They made everything from scratch, cutting the wood, colouring the wool.”



She tells us she has prepared a room to let to visitors. The problem though, she says, is that the village is on the road to Tabas, a city hardly ever visited from Yazd. Even though it could be a tourist destination because of the ruins of the old village, and the great weather, visitors come few and far in between. I ask if she prepares meals for letters. When she says she does, we make lunch plans and head out the door.

There is a rooster on the street walking proudly, and a golden hen quickly following. Like other roosters in this village, in their beautiful plumage of dark green, orange and black, they parade about like kings. The hens are golden, not the white factory farm chickens that have become common in many small Iranian towns and villages. The hen and rooster walk faster as I follow them, then suddenly disappear into a house. It’s rundown, and there is no door, so I walk in. It looks like it's been converted into a parking lot for old cars and motorcycles. The rooster seems to look in my direction, then at a dozen or so chickens scurrying in the vicinity. I decide not to intrude upon his kingdom, and return to the street, where I hear other animals.

At one house, a group of sheep are eating yellow carrots, one of the main products of the village. At another house, a farmer is grooming his sheep. House after house, I get the impression that the sheep are well groomed and well fed. Heavy snowfall this year made for a difficult winter for the villagers, but good grass for the sheep.

On our way back to Ms Noroozi’s for lunch, we buy bread at one house and fresh kashk from another. Kashk is drained and dried sour yogurt, a staple ingredient in many Iranian dishes. It is made in many forms. In Kerman, it is primarily sold in ball shape. But in Kharanagh, they make it into strips. You can buy kashk at any grocery store in Iran, but the quality of kashk in villages, where it is made straight from sheep yogurt, unprocessed, is unlike anything you can buy in the city. The taste and smell is so good I start eating it raw.



Photograph: Tehran Bureau Photograph: Tehran Bureau

We run into four old men sitting around talking.

“You have a beautiful village” I say.



“You want to live here?” one of them asks with a grin.



“I’d love to,” I say before one of them interrupts me.



“Well, your college degrees are of no use here. What kinds of actual work do you know how to do?”



“I can raise and look after chickens,” I say proudly. He smiles. “That’ll probably do.”



A rare sight: three generations in the village. Photograph: Tehran Bureau Photograph: Tehran Bureau

Outside Ms Noroozi’s, a white Pride Kia is parked outside her door. Two teenagers are sitting in the car. Her children? Earlier she had told me her husband works for the Ardakan municipality, and that her two kids are high-school students, inside studying.

They drive away as we approach.

I tell Ms Noroozi we don’t want to ruin the guest room she’s just cleaned, we’d be happy to sit inside her living room.

“My husband is sleeping” she says. I peep through the window. There is no sign of anybody inside.



Mr Salimi asks to pray before we eat lunch. She is ecstatic. For the next hour she walks around saying: “I can’t tell you how glad I am that my guests pray. No one these days cares about these things anymore."



"Shokr-e khoda, shokr-e khoda," she keeps repeating, thank God.



A village picnic. Photograph: Tehran Bureau Photograph: Tehran Bureau

We sit in the yard to eat. She’s prepared one of my favourite meals: kashkal josh. A soupy dish made with fresh herbs, walnuts and kashk. We spread the rug in the yard and eat under the hot desert sun. A cool, gentle breeze passes through. The homemade bread that complements the dish is so fresh we can smell the the scent of cumin and coriander all around us. I savour every bite.

The meal ends as it starts, with tea.

I ask her about the village ruins. “There were still people in it ten years ago. But everyone went to Yazd, to the mines. Or, they took loans and built houses a few miles up north.” There is a uranium mine and the Chadormalu iron ore mines in what is now called the Kharanagh section, with a population of 2000. It is mostly the older villagers, too old to work in the mines, who have stayed behind.

“The smartest of them took out the biggest loans and built factories a few miles from the village,” says Ms Noroozi. “Some of these places aren’t even in operation, but there was a lot of money to be made in loan-taking. And then they moved to Yazd. When I was a kid, all those empty houses you saw were full; this place was bustling with people and with work, farming and raising animals.”



During the last census, in 2006, the population of the village stood at 350.



The old village adobe houses had no plumbing or gas and were too fragile to renovate, so those who did stay, had to build new homes. Ms Noroozi has plumbing in hers, but for drinking water she goes to the town square. She has no gas and had to endure the harsh winter without it.

“Were those your kids in the white Kia?” Mr Salimi asks.



“Yes, they were,” she replies. “Going to study at the library.”

Mr Salimi looks confused: “The girl, she looked, ummm, older than a junior high school student.”

The village has schooling up to eighth grade.



An awkward silence ensues. I try to change the subject. I ask about the tiny mosque I saw a few miles down the road. “A hand of Imam Reza is buried there” she says, referring to the eight Shi’a Imam buried in Mashhad.



I want to visit the shrine before I leave. I ask her if she wants to come along. She jumps at the chance. “With the lord’s blessing, we were able to afford some materials to rebuild the shrine.” I look at old pictures. It used to be an adobe house, it now looks like any other mosque you would see in a city or village in Iran.



Village and new mosque Photograph: Tehran Bureau Photograph: Tehran Bureau

When we get to the shrine, Mr Salimi waits outside. Inside, Ms Noroozi confesses.



“I don’t have a husband, or kids. I’ve never been married. I saw that a man was with you, so I made up the story about them so he wouldn’t know I’m alone. Those kids you saw, they were my niece and nephew, they come to check up on me before I have visitors.”



I am not surprised. She tells me about the hardship with which she lives, and the scarcity she deals with. “It’s a hard life these days. Ever since the people of the village left, nothing feels dependable anymore.”



We drop off Ms Noroozi and head to Yazd. I turn back for one last look at the village now cast in shadows.

Iran Standard Time is a series of personal looks at life in the Islamic republic today.

