Masuleh

Interesting facts

A Levallois stone core found in the Masuleh area is thought to have been made by Neanderthals more than 40,000 years ago.

Archaeologists have found pottery, animal bones and stone tools in the area dating back about 7,000 years.

Sites on peaks above 2,500 metres around Masuleh show human occupation from the Neolithic right through to the Ilkhanid era of the 14th century.

The original settlement, Old Masuleh, is dated to around 1006 AD and lay about 6 km northwest of the present village.

Disease and raids by neighbouring communities are given as the reasons the inhabitants abandoned Old Masuleh for the current site.

The place was known in the past as Khortab and Masalar before taking the name Masuleh.

The people of Masuleh are Talysh and traditionally speak Talysh, a northwestern Iranian language, rather than Persian.

Local ironworkers used four-stage furnaces for making sponge iron, a design possibly dating to the late Parthian period and later known as the Persian furnace.

The Masuleh Rudkhan river runs through the village, and a waterfall lies only about 200 metres away.

The population shrank by almost a third in a decade, from 554 in 2006 to 393 in 2016.

Why it is worth it

Masuleh climbs a steep mountainside in the Alborz range of northern Iran so tightly that its houses are stacked on one another: the flat roof of each lower house serves as the courtyard, terrace or footpath of the one above. The result is a village with almost no conventional streets, only stepped lanes, stairways and rooftops that double as public walkways, and with a difference of about 100 m in height between its lowest and highest houses. Motor vehicles cannot enter its narrow passages, and the village is explored entirely on foot.

The village lies at about 1,050 m above sea level in Gilan Province, in a green, frequently misty valley not far inland from the southern shore of the Caspian Sea. Its houses, usually no more than two storeys high, are built of stone, timber and earth, with wooden window frames and lattice work, and many walls are rendered in a yellowish clay plaster that gives the slope its warm, uniform colour. The cool, wet climate, with heavy rain and fog especially in autumn, shaped this compact and economical way of building, and Masuleh is often cited in Iran as a model of sustainable traditional architecture. In the lower part of the village are the bazaar and the main mosque, and Masuleh also has a shrine linked to Aun ibn Ali, a figure associated in local tradition with the coming of Islam to the area.

The present settlement replaced an older one, known as Old Masuleh, which lay several kilometres to the northwest; according to the most widely repeated account, the inhabitants moved to the current site in the period after the Mongol invasions. The region's prosperity rested for centuries on ironworking, with furnaces for smelting iron in the surrounding mountains, together with metal and leather crafts; today these trades have largely disappeared. Masuleh, home to fewer than 400 people at the 2016 census, was entered on Iran's national heritage list in 1975, and it has been on Iran's tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage since 2007.

Getting there

Masuleh is reached by road from Fuman, about 32 km to the east, and lies roughly 60 km southwest of Rasht, the capital of Gilan Province. The town of Masal is about 26 km away in a straight line, across the mountains. The nearest airport is Rasht's Sardar-e-Jangal Airport (RAS), about 59 km away.

Masuleh

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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