Bushehr

Bushehr is the capital of Bushehr province, a port city of about 220,000 people on a narrow peninsula on Iran’s Persian Gulf coast. From the 1730s until the early twentieth century it was Iran’s main seaport and the base of the British Residency in the Persian Gulf, and its old quarter of coral-stone houses with wooden balconies is one of the most distinctive historic townscapes on the Iranian coast.

Elamite and Sasanian beginnings

The southern end of the Bushehr peninsula has been settled since the Elamite period. At Liyan, excavated by the French archaeologist Maurice Pézard in 1913, bricks inscribed by the Middle Elamite king Shilhak-Inshushinak in the twelfth century BCE record a temple, showing that the kings of Susa controlled this stretch of coast. In the Sasanian period the town of Rev-Ardashir, at modern Rishahr, south of the city, was a port and a bishopric of the Church of the East. Medieval geographers mention small ports on the peninsula, but the great harbours of the coast were elsewhere, at Siraf and later Hormuz.

Nader Shah’s naval base

Modern Bushehr was built by Nader Shah. In 1734 he chose the small fishing village on the peninsula as the base for a new Iranian navy, to be used against the Arab powers of the Persian Gulf, and the town was briefly called Bandar-e Naderiyeh. The navy did not survive him, but the port did. As Bandar Abbas declined after the fall of the Safavids, trade shifted to Bushehr, which was much closer to Shiraz and the centre of the country.

The British Residency

In 1763 Karim Khan Zand allowed the English East India Company to open a factory at Bushehr, and over the next century it became the seat of the British Political Resident in the Persian Gulf, the official who managed Britain’s treaties with the Arab rulers on the southern shore. Bushehr was in effect Iran’s window on the sea: most imports for Shiraz, Isfahan and Tehran came through it and up the steep caravan road over the Zagros passes.

British troops occupied the town twice. In 1856, during the Anglo-Persian War over Herat, a British expedition landed and held Bushehr until peace was made in 1857. In the First World War British forces again occupied it, in 1915, to secure the Gulf. Local resistance led by the Tangestani chiefs and by Ra’is Ali Delvari, who was killed in 1915, is remembered in Iran as an episode of national defence. The Residency moved to Bahrain in 1946.

The old town

The historic quarter at the northern tip of the peninsula, Bafeh-ye Ghadim (the “old fabric”), grew up in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a dense maze of narrow lanes between tall merchants’ houses. They were built of porous stone from the shore, plastered white, with wooden balconies and screens, شناشیل (shenâshil), that catch the sea breeze while keeping out the sun. Windcatchers are rare here: in the humid air, cross-ventilation from the sea mattered more.

Several houses have been restored as museums and cultural centres, and the quarter also contains mosques, old water cisterns and a nineteenth-century Armenian church, a reminder of the merchant communities, Armenian, Indian, Jewish and European, that once worked here.

Music, mourning and literature

Bushehr has its own musical tradition, with strong African and Arab influences brought by sailors and by the descendants of enslaved East Africans. The نی‌انبان (ney-anbân), a bagpipe made from a goatskin bag, and the large dammam drums are its signature sounds. During Muharram, mourning processions with drums and cymbals (senj o dammam) are among the most striking in Iran. Musicians from Bushehr, such as the Lian ensemble, brought this music to national and international audiences from the 1990s.

The novelist Sadegh Chubak was born in Bushehr in 1916, and his novel Tangsir (1963), about a man from the Tangestan hinterland who takes revenge on the merchants who cheated him, is set in the town. It was later made into a well-known Iranian film.

Oil, gas and the nuclear plant

Today Bushehr province is at the centre of Iran’s energy industry. The giant offshore South Pars gas field, shared with Qatar, is developed from Asaluyeh, about 270 km to the south-east, and Kharg Island, Iran’s main crude oil terminal, lies off the coast to the north-west. South of the city stands the Bushehr nuclear power plant, begun by the German firm Kraftwerk Union in 1975, halted after the 1979 revolution and damaged in the Iran–Iraq War, then completed with Russian assistance and connected to the grid in 2011. Its role in Iran’s nuclear programme has been the subject of international debate.

Food on the Bushehr coast

The local cooking relies on fish, shrimp, dates and spice. Typical dishes are ghalieh mahi and ghalieh meygu, fish or shrimp stews with tamarind, coriander and fenugreek; dopiazeh, with plenty of onion; and the fish curries that show the old ties with India. For a broader introduction, see Persian food.

Getting there

Bushehr has an airport with flights from Tehran and other cities, and is about four hours by road from Shiraz, down through the Zagros. The seafront promenade is the place to be in the evening. October to April is the most comfortable time to visit. For opening hours, transport and safety, check current official information and your own government’s travel advice.