Tehran's Geometric Aesthetics and Fission | Half a Century of the Azadi Tower's Swaying Spire

🇮🇷Iran is a great place to wander, with cultural shocks everywhere. Especially the Azadi Tower, where lines and light and shadow make everything more psychedelic.🌌 🌄As the setting sun casts the 33-meter-high milky white marble spire into silhouette, I count the cracks in the tower's 2,848 Isfahan stone slabs—they tremble with the evening rush hour traffic, like the gold foil from the 1971 celebration of the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian Empire under the Pahlavi dynasty, peeling off layer by layer into the dust and haze of Tehran. 🇮🇷An Inverted Imperial Crown The spiral staircase is plastered with faded historical photos: where Nixon shook hands with the last emperor, there is now a rainbow painted by young people during the signing of the 2015 nuclear agreement; in the glass display cases at the bottom of the tower, the wreckage of a downed American drone sits alongside a model of a nuclear facility. A boy wearing Air Force 1s points to the Persian inscription on the dome and asks me, "Do you know why it was renamed Azadi Tower after the revolution?" Without waiting for an answer, he smiles and plays Taylor Swift on his phone, the remix drowning out the recording of Khomeini's speech in the basement exhibition hall. 🇮🇷A Spectrum in the Undercurrent In the shadow of the tower's base, girls in headscarves are photographing a bizarre collage of anti-American graffiti and Kevin Hart memes. Western tourists twirl their selfie sticks, superimposing the crescent moon on the tower's top and the Alborz Mountains to the north into a geometric symbol in their lenses. The local guide suddenly lowers his voice: "Look at those cracks—they were shattered during the 1979 hostage crisis rallies, and a few were deliberately left during the 2013 nuclear negotiations repairs." 🇮🇷When the beam of daylight pierces the twilight, the entire tower transforms into a giant projection screen. As shown in the picture above.☝🖼 📝Tips: It is recommended to visit on Tuesday evenings to avoid crowds. Photography of the nuclear facility model is prohibited in the basement exhibition hall. The graffiti wall on the west side of the tower has excellent lighting at sunset. 🔱Explore the world's beautiful destinations🔱