Your grandchildren will be the age you are today.
They will live in a world you wouldn't recognise. Artificial intelligence will have reshaped everything. The gap between 2026 and 2086 will likely be the greatest leap humanity has ever made in a single generation.
Your grandparents already lived through something like this. But for Iranians, the rupture didn't take sixty years. It took a few months. And on a morning in February 1979, the world they had known ceased to exist.
Here is what it looked like, thirteen years before.
It is 1966. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi has been on the throne since 1941. He is 47, at the peak of his power — and convinced he has found the formula for making Iran a great power of the twentieth century. His White Revolution, launched in 1963, has redistributed land, given women the right to vote, sent literacy brigades to the villages. Oil money flows. Tehran is growing at extraordinary speed.
People call Tehran the Paris of the Middle East — a phrase that makes Parisians smile and that contains, nonetheless, a slice of reality. In the city's northern neighbourhoods, French boutiques line the avenues, women wear the same dresses as on the grands boulevards, French is the second language of the elite, and cinemas screen the films of the French New Wave. Iran is producing its own remarkable cinema — Dariush Mehrjui, Abbas Kiarostami who is only 26 and just beginning.
And in the shadow of all this — SAVAK. The Shah's secret police, trained by the CIA and Mossad, which listens, watches, infiltrates, arrests and makes people disappear. A brilliant Iran on the surface, fractured underneath. Let's start with life itself.
An ordinary day — Tehran, a Tuesday in November 1966
Her name is Maryam. She is 28. She teaches at a girls' school in the Vanak neighbourhood of central-northern Tehran. She earns 3,200 rials a month — a decent salary for a woman her age, made possible by the White Revolution, which opened public education to women a few years earlier. She lives in a three-room apartment with her husband Ali, who works at a trading company. They don't have children yet — they talk about it, but Maryam wants to teach a few more years first. Her mother finds this strange. Her colleagues understand.
Every morning before leaving, Maryam slips into her bag the small copy of Hafez's Divan that her father gave her at the age of fourteen. The book is worn, its pages warped by several winters of humidity. She doesn't carry it to teach — classical poetry is for secondary school, not her class. She carries it because she practises fal-e Hafez: when a decision weighs on her, or when she needs something she couldn't quite name, she closes her eyes, thinks of her question, and opens the book at random. The verse that appears is the answer. This is a practice her parents handed down to her, and their parents before them, and the Persians for six centuries. Here is her day.
Maryam is not exceptional. She represents a generation of urban Iranian women who seized the opportunities opened by the White Revolution — education, work, mobility — while remaining rooted in a thousand years of Persian culture. This is not a contradiction. It is the richness of a country that never had to choose between its roots and its future.
Until 1979.
The Iranian table — rice, saffron and absolute hospitality
The Iranian table of 1966 is one of the great cuisines of the world — and one of the least known abroad. It is not Arab food, with which outsiders sometimes confuse it. It is not Turkish. It is something distinct, very old, very refined.
Rice — berenj — is at the centre of everything. Not boiled rice as in Southeast Asia. Chelo rice — steamed by a method that takes an hour and produces a golden, crispy crust at the bottom of the pot, the tahdig, which is the most coveted part of any meal. Achieving a good tahdig is an art. Iranian women take pride in it the way French bakers take pride in their crust.
Iranian hospitality is not optional. It is a moral, cultural, almost spiritual obligation. If someone enters your home at mealtime, they eat with you. No question. No hesitation. And if you refuse three times before accepting — as ta'arof requires — you aren't being hypocritical. You are being polite. The difference is real, and everyone understands it.
On every table, the plate of fresh herbs — sabzi khordan. Chives, mint, basil, watercress, radishes. Eaten by hand, like bread. With cheese, with rice, with anything. This plate says something about the Iranian relationship to freshness, to nature, to the simple taste of real things.
Khorasan saffron — the world's finest, grown on the Ghaen plain for millennia — perfumes the feast-day dishes, gilds the wedding rice, colours the braised chicken. Iran produces a very large share of the world's saffron in 1966. It is a wealth that nobody in the country particularly measures because it has always been there.
And this generous, patient, seasonal cuisine held not only because of a thousand-year culinary culture. It held because a country hadn't yet decided that time was too scarce a resource to eat properly.
Money — oil and what it concealed
Iran in 1966 is a booming oil country. Petroleum revenues — nationalised since 1951, but managed since 1954 by an international consortium in which the Iranian government receives 50% of profits — are rapidly transforming the urban economy. Tehran grows, modernises, electrifies.
But this oil creates a two-speed economy of a brutality that is rarely discussed. In northern Tehran — Shemiran, Niavaran, Elahiyeh — live the families of the regime's beneficiaries: generals, technocrats, importers. Their houses have gardens, swimming pools, American cars in the drive. In the southern districts — around the bazaar, in the newer working-class areas — live factory workers and recently arrived migrants from the countryside, in conditions that contrast violently with the prosperity on display a few kilometres north.
Petroleum revenues create an illusion of national wealth that masks growing structural inequality. The Shah invests heavily in the army, large infrastructure projects, and urban modernisation — but relatively little in rural development, where more than half the population still lives. Peasants arriving in Tehran in search of work find a city that looks like Paris on the surface and has no jobs for them. This frustration, accumulated over twenty years, will be one of the forces that fuel the revolution.
Work — modernisation at forced march
Iran in 1966 is undergoing a brutal economic transformation. In fifteen years, millions of people have left the countryside for the cities. Industrialisation is accelerating — textile factories, steel works, refineries, food processing. The government's development plans are creating jobs in public administration, state-owned enterprises, and the army — one of the country's largest employers.
For women like Maryam, the opportunities opened by the White Revolution are real. Teaching, medicine, public administration — these sectors are opening to them in ways that didn't exist for their mothers. This isn't universal — in the countryside and in religiously traditional families, women typically don't work outside the home. But in the cities, something is changing.
Happiness — or rather, poetry as refuge
Iran in 1966 doesn't offer its people the quiet security of working-class France, nor the community belonging of industrial England, nor the collective sense of purpose of Japan's miracle. What it offers is different, more fragile, and more beautiful.
It offers poetry.
Persian may be the language with the most living relationship to its own classical literature of any tongue in the world. Hafez died in 1390. And in 1966, every educated Iranian carries dozens of his verses by heart — not as historical curiosity, but as actual resources for daily life. When Maryam opens her Divan at random, she isn't performing folklore. She is doing something that millions of Iranians do every day, as they have for six centuries.
Rumi, Saadi, Ferdowsi, Hafez — these poets are psychological contemporaries. They say things about grief, love, doubt, joy that remain true. This temporal depth — this ability to draw on fourteen centuries of wisdom expressed in verse — is a resource that very few cultures in the world have preserved this vividly.
And in a country where you cannot speak freely about politics, where the walls have ears, where SAVAK can knock on any door — poetry is also a space of freedom that no one can entirely confiscate. A verse from Hafez can say in 1966 what you would never dare say otherwise. And everyone understands.
Three cities — Tehran, Isfahan, Mashhad in 1966
Tehran in 1966 is genuinely two cities that almost never speak to each other. In the north — Shemiran, Niavaran, Elahiyeh — the regime's beneficiaries in their garden villas, Chevrolets and Mercedes in the drive, daughters returning from Paris or London with degrees. At night, the cabarets of Lalehzar — Tehran's "Broadway" — offer orchestras, dancers, wine, atmosphere.
In the south — around the Grand Bazaar, in the lanes of Nasser Khosrow, in the popular quarters where recently arrived rural families crowd together — it is another city. More religious, more traditional, more suspicious of the Shah's top-down modernisation. It is here, in the mosques and alleyways, that Khomeini's ideas — he has been in exile in Najaf since 1964 — circulate on hand-copied audio cassettes.
"Isfahan is half the world" — Isfahan nesf-e jahan ast — says the Persian proverb. This is not modesty. The Shah Square, surrounded by the Shah Mosque, the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque, the Ali Qapu Palace and the Grand Bazaar, is one of the most beautiful public spaces on earth. Built in the 17th century by Shah Abbas I, in 1966 it is alive, inhabited, crossed by horse-drawn carriages and children at play.
In a workshop in the bazaar, a coppersmith has been hammering since six in the morning. Each stroke is precise, slightly angled, carving a floral motif his father taught him, and that his father had learned from his. The tray he is making will be finished in two days. He doesn't know where it will go — perhaps to a house in Tehran, perhaps bought by a German tourist. He doesn't care. What matters is the gesture. The sound of the hammer on metal has echoed in this lane since morning. The neighbours hear it without listening. It is the sound of the neighbourhood, as it always has been.
In the evening, under the arches of the Khaju Bridge — the old red-brick bridge over the Zayandeh River — men sit to smoke and recite verses. The water makes a deep sound against the stone pillars. Someone begins a ghazal by Hafez. Another picks up the next verse. They continue like this as the night comes down, as if nobody needed to sleep.
Mashhad is two thousand kilometres from Tehran — and in another world. The holy city, the shrine of Imam Reza, eighth imam of the Shia. Every year, millions of pilgrims arrive — from Iran, Iraq, Central Asia. The atmosphere is deeply religious. Women wear the chador. Clerics teach in the seminaries. The Shah's modernisation is received with suspicion, sometimes with open hostility.
In 1966, Mashhad looks most like the Iran that will emerge in 1979. Not because Mashhad is behind — but because Mashhad chose to preserve something Tehran was in the process of losing. Which of the two was right? The question has no clean answer. The fact that it doesn't is one of the permanent wounds of modern Iranian history.
The street at night — an ordinary scene
The plane trees have shed their leaves. On the wide pavement, their bare branches trace dark arabesques against the neon signs of the shops. The smell of koofteh — meatballs simmered in tomato and spice broth — drifts from a restaurant whose door is ajar. Someone inside laughs loudly. The sound comes out into the street and dissolves.
Couples walk past. Women in autumn coats with a light headscarf. Women in chadors. Women with nothing at all — dark hair loose, lipstick. All three on the same pavement, without anyone finding anything to say about it. In 1966, this is still possible.
A roasted-seeds vendor pushes his cart — pistachios, watermelon seeds, roasted chickpeas. The smell of salt and warm smoke. A man stops, hands over a few rials without bargaining, fills a paper-cone bag and walks away crunching. This gesture is the same as it has been for generations.
A group of young men comes out of a cinema. They're arguing with animation. Someone quotes a line from the film. Someone else answers with a verse from Hafez. The two things mix in the same conversation and nobody finds it strange.
Thirteen years from now, some of these cinemas will be closed. Some of these films won't be shown. Some of these unveiled women will have to choose between leaving and covering up.
But tonight, the street simply lives.
SAVAK — the fear with no name
Iran in 1966 has its equivalent of the Kray twins and the French Connection — but it is radically different, and infinitely more threatening. Because the danger doesn't come from organised crime. It comes from the state itself.
SAVAK — Sazman-e Ettelaat va Amniyat-e Keshvar, the National Intelligence and Security Organisation — was created in 1957 with help from the CIA and Mossad. It surveils, listens, infiltrates. It arrests political opponents — Communists, nationalists, Islamists, intellectuals who criticise too much. In its prisons, people disappear. In its interrogation rooms, people don't come out as they went in.
What it creates in ordinary life is subtle and deep: a generalised self-censorship. You don't talk about politics in public. You don't criticise the Shah — or if you do, in whispers, with metaphors, behind closed doors. This restraint isn't political indifference — Iranians are deeply political. It is survival.
In the teahouses, in the bazaar lanes, in family conversations, there circulates a coded form of speech inherited from centuries of occupation and tyranny: the truth said sideways, dressed in poetry, wrapped in a joke. Hafez himself wrote this way. The tradition is very old.
Values — honour, hospitality and seven centuries of Hafez
The central value of Iranian society in 1966 — across all classes, in all regions — is hospitality. Not as social courtesy but as deep moral obligation. To receive someone in your home is to offer them protection. Refusing would be a shame that ta'arof — the Persian code of honour and courtesy — makes structurally impossible.
Ta'arof itself is often misunderstood by outsiders. You refuse three times before accepting — but everyone knows that by the third refusal, you mean yes. This isn't hypocrisy. It's a system of social interaction that says: I'm giving you the chance to withdraw without losing face. You deserve that option. It is an act of respect.
And then there is poetry — present in the language, in conversations, in decisions. An Iranian who wants to express something complex doesn't reach for new words. They reach into their memory for the verse from Hafez or Saadi that already says it, better than they could. Literature isn't a cultivated leisure — it's a mode of thought.
Forough Farrokhzad — the voice that was about to fall silent
In 1966, Forough Farrokhzad is 31 years old. She is the greatest Iranian poet of the twentieth century — and one of the most powerful female voices in world poetry of the era. Her collections — Tavaludy Digar (Another Birth), Asyan (Sin) — transformed Persian poetry by freeing it from its formal conventions and introducing the female body, desire, and revolt in direct, modern language.
She shocked. She was attacked by religious conservatives. She was celebrated by progressive intellectuals. She kept writing.
In 1967 — one year after this November afternoon — she will die in a car accident in Tehran. She is 32 years old. The loss is enormous for Iranian culture. And after 1979, her books will be banned for years.
In 1966, she is still alive. Her verses circulate. Women like Maryam know them and love them — though not always able to say so openly in every company.
Mohammad Reza Shah — the man who wanted everything too fast
Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi is 47 in 1966. He has been on the throne since 1941. He was humiliated in 1953 — forced to flee to Rome for a few days when Prime Minister Mosaddegh appeared to have taken power — before being restored by a coup backed by the CIA and British intelligence. That humiliation never entirely leaves him.
His project is clear and ambitious: make Iran a great power — the "Great Civilisation" — by modernising it at full speed. The army, industry, education, infrastructure. He sees himself as the successor of a 2,500-year Persian imperial lineage — and in 1971 will stage a spectacular celebration at Persepolis at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, while Iranians die of hunger in the southern provinces.
That is the Shah's fundamental contradiction: he wants to modernise a country without democratising its institutions. He wants progress without freedom. This combination — economic growth plus political repression — works for twenty years. Then it explodes.
"Iran will be a great power by 1983. We will join the club of advanced industrial nations."— Mohammad Reza Shah, circa 1966
Meanwhile, elsewhere — France, USA, Saudi Arabia in 1966
De Gaulle walks out of NATO and talks about French grandeur. France and Iran in 1966 share one unexpected thing: both are countries searching for a path between American influence and their own cultural identity. France manages it within democratic continuity. Iran manages it within authoritarian contradiction.
America is omnipresent in Iran — the 1953 coup, the military advisors, the oil technicians, the pop culture. Young people in northern Tehran listen to the Beatles and James Brown. This accelerated Americanisation is one of the fault lines that will feed the popular resentment of 1979.
The other great oil power of the Middle East takes precisely the opposite path. No White Revolution, no women's rights, no sartorial modernisation. The House of Saud consolidates its power by relying on the Wahhabi ulema. Two visions of Islam and modernity in collision — a rivalry that will shape the region for decades.
The Iran-1966 combination is unique in the world: a 3,000-year civilisation, a living poetic language, a real revolution improving some lives, a culture of hospitality and refinement without equal — and a secret police watching over all of it. Light and shadow, inseparable.
What changed — and how everything disappeared in a few months
In the other episodes of this series, things disappeared slowly. The French bakery closed when the supermarket opened. The London docks declined over twenty years. Japan's lifetime employment cracked gradually through the 1990s.
For Iran, it was different.
What the Shah had never understood — what nobody had quite grasped before it happened — is that you cannot modernise a country without giving it a voice. You cannot redistribute land, send women to university, build motorways, and simultaneously maintain a secret police that silences all criticism. The contradiction between the project and the method was unsustainable. It took twenty years to explode. But it exploded.
And the revolution of 1979 was not made by the Islamists alone. This is its most painful irony. It was made by an improbable and temporary coalition: Khomeini's Islamists, Marxist Tudeh members, National Front nationalists, secular intellectuals, left-wing students, bazaari merchants ruined by the Shah's import competition, and peasants disappointed by the land reform. All of them wanted to bring down the Shah. None of them had the same Iran in mind for after.
The secular liberals thought they would share power with the religious. The Marxists thought they were steering the revolution toward socialism. The women who had marched unveiled thought they were marching for their freedom.
By 1980-81, most had understood their mistake. Many paid for it with their lives.
In 1977, the first demonstrations. In 1978, the great strikes, the crowds in the streets. On 16 January 1979, the Shah leaves Iran — never to return. He dies in exile in 1980. On 1 February 1979, Khomeini lands in Tehran after fifteen years in exile. On 11 February 1979, the revolution is complete.
Within months, everything changes. The cabarets close. Wine disappears from restaurants. The veil becomes mandatory for women in public. Universities are purged. Thousands of Iranians flee — to Paris, Los Angeles, Toronto, London. They take their carpets, their photographs, their editions of Hafez, and a country they will never see again.
Nothing collapsed slowly.
Everything burned in a few months.
And some things do not rebuild.
This world still exists — here's where
Iran in 1966 is the most painful episode in this series — because this world didn't gradually fade, replaced by something else. It was erased abruptly.
But the elements that composed it — absolute hospitality, poetry as a daily language, the generous and unhurried table, the coexistence of modernity and millennial tradition — exist elsewhere today. In other countries. In other forms. In other languages.
You've been invited to dinner by someone you met two days ago.
The table is covered in dishes you didn't ask for. The regional wine, made by the grandfather. The bread baked this morning.
Your host raises his glass and recites a few lines from a 12th-century poet that everyone at the table already knows.
And you understand that you are in a culture that has not decided the past is excess baggage.
Not Georgia. The way of welcoming.
You don't leave a country. You leave a way of living.
Sixty years from now
It is 2026. Artificial intelligence is restructuring the world at a speed nobody entirely controls. In sixty years, your grandchildren will live in something you wouldn't recognise.
Maryam, the Tehran schoolteacher, had something you may be searching for without knowing it. Not the Shah. Not SAVAK. Not the glaring inequality between the two Tehrans. But poetry as a daily resource. Hospitality as reflex. The table as sacred space. And that Persian way of holding together, in the same day, the most recent modernity and the most ancient wisdom.
What your grandchildren will be searching for in 2086 — that temporal depth, a culture that didn't sacrifice its past on the altar of the present — may be what you still have a chance to find today, in certain parts of the world.
They lived in an interval between two worlds. They didn't know which one they preferred — until the day one of them disappeared and the other turned out to be nothing like what they had imagined.
Frequently asked questions
Did Iranian women really not wear the veil in 1966?
In urbanised and educated circles, no — the veil was not mandatory and educated working women in the cities generally did not wear it. The Shah's father, Reza Shah, had actually banned the veil in some public contexts in the 1930s — a policy later softened. By 1966, whether to wear a veil largely depended on social class, region, and personal conviction. Women in southern Tehran, in religious cities like Qom, or in rural areas typically wore it. Women in educated northern Tehran circles typically did not. It was only after 1979 that it became legally mandatory for all women in public space.
What exactly was SAVAK?
SAVAK (the National Intelligence and Security Organisation) was created in 1957 with assistance from the American CIA and Israeli Mossad. Its agents surveilled political opponents, intellectuals, trade unionists, and religious figures. Its methods — arbitrary arrest, torture, disappearances — were extensively documented by Amnesty International from the 1970s. SAVAK contributed significantly to radicalising opposition to the Shah and creating the conditions for the 1979 revolution.
What is fal-e Hafez and is it still practised?
Fal-e Hafez is a form of divination by poetry: you think of a question or a concern, open the Divan of Hafez at random, and the first verse your eye falls on is interpreted as a response or an omen. The practice dates from the 15th century and remains very much alive in Iran today — even after the revolution, even among people who don't define themselves as religious. The Persian New Year (Nowruz) is traditionally the occasion for a family fal-e Hafez session.
Who was Forough Farrokhzad?
Forough Farrokhzad (1934-1967) is considered one of the greatest Iranian poets of the 20th century. Her collections broke the taboos of classical Persian poetry by introducing the female body, desire, and subjectivity in direct, modern terms. Also a filmmaker — her documentary "The House Is Black," about a leper colony, remains a landmark of Iranian cinema — she died in a car accident in Tehran in 1967 at 32. Her works were banned after 1979 but continued to circulate clandestinely. Since the 1990s she has been progressively rehabilitated in Iran.
What comes next in the "1966" series?
Episode 5 covers Italy — the dolce vita, the economic miracle of the 1960s, the Vespas, the piazzas, and a Sunday that genuinely existed. The following episodes will cover Brazil and Argentina.
Keep exploring
Sources: Plan Organisation of Iran — economic data 1960-1979 · Abbas Milani, The Shah (2011) · Ervand Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions (1982) · Forough Farrokhzad, Tavaludy Digar (1964) · Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Gharbzadegi (1962) · Amnesty International — SAVAK reports 1970-1979 · Iranian press archives 1966 · World Bank — Iran economic data.