Baharlu Erotic

The Baharlu are a Turkic-speaking people of Fars province in southern Iran, and their name has traveled a good deal further than most of them ever did. It surfaces first in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries among the Qara Qoyunlu, the Black Sheep Turkoman confederation that ruled from Tabriz across Azerbaijan, Iraq and western Iran, and the ruling house itself is generally reckoned Baharlu. The tribal name is usually traced to Bahar, a district near Hamadan, which points to a northern origin and a long drift south. When the Qara Qoyunlu came apart, the pieces scattered, and one claim runs all the way to the Deccan: the Qutb Shahi sultans of Golconda traced their descent to the Baharlu. Whether or not that genealogy holds, a dynasty in India found the name worth claiming, which tells you something about what it once carried.

What survives now is more local and more interesting. In the 1860s the Qavam family, merchant-governors of Shiraz, assembled five tribal groups into the Khamseh, meaning the five, to secure the caravan roads running up from the Gulf and to give the province a counterweight to the Qashqai. The Baharlu were one of them, alongside the Inanlu and Nafar, both also Turkic, the Arab tribes, and the Persian-speaking Basseri. It was a confederation built by administrative decision rather than by descent, which is unusual, and it held for the better part of a century. Baharlu speech is a southern Oghuz Turkic variety, close enough to Qashqai and to Azerbaijani that outsiders file them all together while speakers hear the difference; Persian now sits alongside it in nearly every household. Religion is Twelver Shia Islam, carried in the ordinary Iranian way, marked at Muharram and at shrines rather than argued over. Pastoral life ran on the vertical calendar of the Zagros: winter in the warm lowlands, summer on high pasture, sheep and goats, tents of black goat hair. Reza Shah's forced settlement campaigns in the 1920s and 1930s broke that cycle and it never fully recovered, so most Baharlu today farm, or live in Shiraz, Neyriz, Darab and Fasa, or have gone abroad entirely. The weaving outlasted the migration. Rugs and bags attributed to the Khamseh, and to the Baharlu in particular, carry a stylized bird figure that collectors know on sight, sold under the name of a confederation that no longer governs anybody.