Abyaneh

Abyaneh sits about ninety minutes from Kashan, up a winding road into the foothills of Mount Karkas, and the color hits you before anything else does. The entire village — houses, retaining walls, the narrow stepped lanes connecting them — is built from a distinctive red-ochre clay quarried from the surrounding cliffs, so the whole settlement reads as a single continuous material, stacked up the slope like it grew there rather than being built.

A Language Older Than the Country Around It

What makes Abyaneh more than a pretty color is the people. Many of the older residents still speak a dialect that linguists trace back to Middle Persian, the language spoken before the Arab conquest brought Islam and eventually reshaped the language into modern Farsi — meaning some of what you hear on the street here is closer to what was spoken over a thousand years ago than to the Persian spoken in Tehran today. An elderly woman selling dried fruit and walnuts outside her door wore the traditional costume without a trace of performance about it: a floral-print headscarf tied under the chin, layered over a long white underscarf, and a wide pleated skirt in a pattern I later learned varies subtly by family. This is daily wear here, not a costume for tourists.

Climbing Toward the Fire Temple Ruins

The village climbs steeply enough that every lane doubles as a staircase, and following one up past the last houses brought me to the crumbling remains of a Sassanid-era fire temple, predating Islam in Iran by several centuries. There isn’t much left standing — a few courses of stone and the ghost of a floor plan — but the position, looking back down over the red rooftops and the poplar trees along the stream below, made the climb worth it on its own.

Lia bought a small jar of Abyaneh’s local sour cherry preserve from a stall by the main square, and it became the thing we rationed most carefully for the rest of the trip — better than anything we’d had in Isfahan or Shiraz, and apparently made from a cherry variety that barely leaves the valley.

When to go: Spring and autumn, when the poplar trees along the stream are either freshly green or turning gold against the red houses. Weekday mornings are much quieter than Friday, when day-trippers from Tehran and Isfahan arrive in numbers.