Bakhtiari Erotic

The Bakhtiari are the largest of the Lur tribal confederations of Iran, and for most of their history they have been defined by movement. Their country is the central Zagros, a belt of ridges and river gorges running from the highlands of Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari province down to the hot plains of Khuzestan. The classic Bakhtiari year followed the grass: winter in the lowlands, then a spring migration on foot over snowbound passes and across the Karun River to summer pastures on the high plateau, and back again in autumn. The 1925 documentary Grass filmed one of these crossings. Most Bakhtiari are now settled in towns such as Shahr-e Kord, Masjed Soleyman and Izeh, or in Isfahan and Ahvaz, but some families still make the migration each year, often with trucks beside the flocks. Their language is Bakhtiari, a dialect of Luri that sits on the same Southwestern Iranian branch as Persian, far closer to it than Kurdish is, and it gives way to Persian easily in the cities. Nearly all are Twelver Shia Muslims, and the faith is lived through Muharram mourning and shrine pilgrimage rather than worn as something that sets them apart from other Iranians. Society is a genealogy of nested units: two great moieties, the Haft Lang and the Chahar Lang, whose names are usually traced to old livestock tax assessments, and beneath them tribes, sub-tribes and clans that once decided where a family camped, whom its children married and which khan spoke for it.

The khans mattered far beyond the mountains. In 1909 Bakhtiari horsemen under Sardar Asad marched on Tehran and helped restore the constitution against Mohammad Ali Shah. A year earlier oil had been struck at Masjed Soleyman in the tribe's winter lands, and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company paid the khans to guard its wells. Armed independence on strategic ground made the Bakhtiari a target for Reza Shah, who in the 1930s executed or imprisoned leading khans, disarmed the tribe and pushed nomads toward settlement. The same khan families later gave Iran a queen, Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiari, and its last prime minister before the 1979 revolution, Shapour Bakhtiar. Bakhtiari cemeteries hold carved stone lions over the graves of men remembered as fighters or leaders. Men's traditional dress is the chogha, a knee-length wool coat in black and white vertical stripes, worn with wide black trousers and a round felt cap. Women wear long layered skirts in strong colors under a tied headscarf. Bakhtiari rugs, especially the compartment garden design, are among Iran's most recognizable, and the line dance at Bakhtiari weddings is still a living part of the calendar.