Identifier: cu31924028627036 (find matches)
Title: Persia past and present; a book of travel and research, with more than two hundred illustrations and a map
Year: 1906 (1900s)
Authors: Jackson, A. V. Williams (Abraham Valentine Williams), 1862-1937
Subjects: Zoroastrianism
Publisher: New York, The Macmillan Company London, Macmillan & Co., ltd.
Contributing Library: Cornell University Library
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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and his beautiful garden— a privilege of which I availed myself twice. The garden-court adjoining his house in the city is laid out in thecharacteristic Persian manner with fruit trees, flowering shrubs,trellised arbors, patliways, and a fountain, and in addition tothis a door opens into a small chamber on one side that is usedas an Izashnah-Gah, or chapel, in which the rites of the Zoroas-trian faith are occasionally conducted by a priest. We spentsome time comfortably seated beneath the fruit trees, chattingon general topics, eating sweetmeats and dates that had beensent by the Zoroastrians of Yezd, and drinking tea, but notsmoking. The business quarters of Arbabs banking establish-ment form a part of his own residence, and a large staff ofclerks and assistants are occupied in conducting his affairs.Some idea of the number of this corps of employees may be ob-tained from the picture of the group which I reproduce. TheZoroastrian banker himself sits in the second row, to the right
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THE ZOROASTRIANS OF TEHERAN 427 of the middle as we face the picture, with a scarf thrown overhis shoulders, and with his two little sons squatting in frontof him, in Oriental fashion, near the fountain. The Teheran Parsis, as I learned, take an interest in educa-tion, and I am able to present also a photograph of their BoysSchool, with the teacher, Kayomars Vafadar, in the foregroundand some of the members of Arbab Jamshids staff of assistantsstanding by the side of the scholars. The attendance at theschool, so far as my information goes, is fair, and is proportion-ately larger than that at the Jewish schools in Teheran, con-sidering the relative size of the respective communities, therebeing 5100 Jews, in all, as against 324 Zoroastrians. Outof the five thousand Jews, statistics in 1904 show a total of only372 attending the two schools for boys and girls establishedat Teheran in 1898 by the Alliance Israelite Universelle — amatter for the consideration of both the amelioration soc

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