Iranian "Mrle" from the city of Yazd
- Irena Jurjević
- 13. stu 2025.
- 4 min čitanja
Updated: 16. stu 2025.
"Traveling is best when you travel alone"
Partibrejkers
This Iranian Mrle from the city of Yazd is my symbol of a phenomenon that you can only experience when traveling alone. Solo travelers will know what I'm talking about.
The way the morning began showed me the direction in which events would unfold that day, and it seems, the rest of my life. It was a typical dry, hot morning outside a hotel in the center of Yazd, a historic city in central Iran.
My friends have retreated around the corner to a travel agency. We've been traveling together for days, the six of us. We laugh, we joke... that's what it's like when we're a team and far from home. I walk somewhere behind them with my head held high, with the absolute self-confidence that the next moment is completely predictable. And just then... a sudden hole appears in the parking lot. The concrete and I instantly merge into close contact and a powerful impact. They say that falling is the only moment in life when we fully feel the present moment. The shock that comes with falling strongly centers our floating thoughts, we become acutely aware that we are actually alive.
I sit on the dusty concrete in front of the hotel, completely confused by this sudden cut in reality, the sharp pain in my leg directs my thoughts to fear "Is it something serious?" Some deeply hidden intuitive voice tells me that everything is okay after all. From somewhere in front of me a man appears; short, black, Iranian. He runs, collects my things scattered around the parking lot, mumbles something to himself, speaks in panic. His world is fast at this moment, mine is very slow. He is saying something to me, to myself, he is funny. I lift the wide leg of my linen pants above the knee, I check for blood. Even in childhood we learned that blood on the knee means something dangerous, when there is none, ugh, it's good, everything is okay.
I wipe the desert dust from the peeled knee with my palms, the Iranian man has turned to stone. He stares at my leg with wide eyes, completely motionless, he has fallen silent. It's clear to me, the problem is not the fall or the sprained ankle, but my lower leg, my bare female skin. I pull down my pant leg in that same second, I don't find it funny. I'm in Iran. I slowly get up from the floor alone, because this man in this country is not allowed to give me a hand.
The day passes as usual pleasantly. We walk, walk, look. They take pictures, walk, walk, look… We lie in a restaurant, have lunch, lie some more. Mosques, shrines, deserts, restaurants, shrines, mosques, my brain is spinning. Churches, walls, paintings, palaces, guides, histories… I'm bored.
And then...
There's that ankle, they're going to the hotel, I can't, my leg hurts, blah, blah, I call a taxi, it won't come, blah, blah... I'm left alone.
I'm staying alone.
I'm standing in an empty, rancid square, in the middle of desert Iran. The deafening din of the post-lunch hour, nowhere to be seen, whistles. It's fifty degrees in the shade today. My leg hurts so much I can't even move, a slight fear is beginning to envelop me at the edges of my body. But I love that fear, because it carries within it a playful devil, my inner Devil. It's from it that I know I'm alive, it pushes me on new journeys, it pushes me to travel alone.
Suddenly it stops being boring. I deliberately slow down the scene, I want to feel this moment to the end. I recognize it, I know what's coming. I'm aware of a smile creeping into the corners of my mouth. The unknown at last. Adventure!
My blood starts to circulate, my brain wakes up; it becomes sharp, fast, agile. That's how it is when I travel alone. Welcome to the jungle!
"So what do I do now?" This moment of loss, of unpredictability, gives a tempting spice to travel, to life. I look left, I look right, I start thinking. Right now I have no answer, and when I don't have an answer then I do nothing. I wait. Out of nowhere a black car appears and stops in front of me. A man is driving, while a woman, all wrapped in black, as befits this most conservative city in Iran, gets out of the car and greets me in broken English, offering to help. I tell her that I need a taxi to the hotel, but no taxi driver will take me, because the distance is too short for them, or rather too cheap.
The woman shows me the last house in the row, she says it's a hotel, she mentions a man in a black suit in front of the hotel, I should contact him. What kind of man, there's not a fly in the air. I look closer and in the distance through the hot haze I see a black outline. She says: "That man over there with the hat, contact him. And don't talk to anyone on the street except him." "And who am I going to talk to, for God's sake, there's not a living soul." She doesn't know that the Devil in me is just waiting for what she's worried about, to be left alone in an unknown country...
The painful journey across the square on one leg took a good five minutes. The black man with a mustache and hat (and a suit that was fifty degrees) is the manager of that hotel in the city center. Showman, as befits every Mrle, immediately arranges a taxi for me, we chat, have a joke, he asks me if I will teach him a salsa step. Of course I will, sir! I momentarily forget that my leg has been taken away from pain and that dancing is actually forbidden in this country. That's when this picture was taken.
He is the first person I met in Iran. Traveling in a team is fun, the group gives us security, but also isolation at the same time. I never use GPS because it separates me from real people, from street life. The culture of the country is not in the museum, but on the dirty and chaotic streets of the city.
Street life is my style.