A Report on a Party and the Guests

Abstract

“People of protest,” it may be the best name for the men encountering the dictatorship of Qajar dynasty and Reza Shah—The first king of Pahlavi Dynasty (1921–1939) in Iran— the men who paid an expensive price for being protesters: being vanished in the history. In the summer of 2011, we conducted excavation at Neshat Garden and at the house of Kamal ol Molk—the famous painter of Qajarid Iran— two sites dating from the previous century. The interviews indicated the Garden was used for the parties in which numerous guests were invited, but the finds of the archeological investigation represent also a hidden function for the site as well. Studying the agency of garden owners, local villagers and Kamal as well as the remained letters and documents showed the possibility of presence of a political opposition group in the region in 1920s. This essay sheds more light on a process in which the Iranian intellectuals have had to change their ironic protests to armed opposition in 1920s–1940s. Though, the excavation at Neshat Garden offers an illustration of this process of transformation of the nature of political opposition.