اوین

What it is

اوین (Evin) is a prison in the foothills of north Tehran, on the slopes below the Alborz, in a neighborhood that gives the prison its name. The Pahlavi state built the original facility in 1972 as a detention center for political prisoners. After the 1979 revolution the new regime kept the building, expanded its capacity, and made it the central holding facility for political prisoners, journalists, dual nationals, women’s-rights defenders, lawyers, students, and protesters.

The architecture is brutalist and the perimeter is military. From the road in Darakeh you can see the watchtowers. Iranian families queueing in the road outside, on visitation days, are part of the urban geography of the city.

The mechanics

Evin is not a single prison. It is a multi-jailer ecology. MOIS runs Ward 209, the main interrogation wing for political detainees. IRGC-Intelligence runs Ward 2-A, a parallel wing where the IRGC holds its own prisoners on its own paperwork. The judiciary runs the women’s ward (historically Ward 350, then split between Evin and Qarchak). General-population wards hold convicted prisoners after sentencing.

Different wards mean different rules. Solitary confinement in 209 can run for months without charges. Visitation, phone access, lawyer access, and medical care vary by ward. Detainees describe being moved between wards as a form of pressure: a transfer to 2-A is the IRGC asserting control; a transfer back to 209 is MOIS reasserting it.

Evin holds Narges Mohammadi, Nobel Peace Prize laureate 2023, still inside as of late 2025. It held the seven Bahá’í leaders for a decade after 2008. It held the journalists Niloofar Hâmedi and Elaheh Mohammadi for sixteen months from September 2022 to January 2024. It is where the 1988 mass executions in Tehran were carried out.

Sanctions and designations

Evin Prison and its directors have been sanctioned by the United States Treasury (under the Magnitsky Act and IRGC-related authorities), by the European Union, by the UK, and by Canada. The most recent US designations target prison officials directly tied to torture, custodial death, and the suppression of post-Mahsa protests. A fire on 15 October 2022, during the height of the protests, killed at least eight prisoners; the regime called it a fight in a tailor shop, witnesses described tear gas and gunfire.

In our voice

The neighborhood is called Evin. The road is called Evin. The mountain is named after the village that became Evin. The prison absorbed the name. Iranian families now use the place-name and the institution interchangeably, which is the regime’s small linguistic victory: it took a word for a north-Tehran neighborhood and made it mean “the place we send the people whose voices we cannot tolerate.” We document the wards because “I was held in Evin” is shorthand for an entire architecture, and the architecture is the point.

Why it’s in this glossary

Every Iranian protest article uses the word. Every diaspora learner reading about Mohammadi, Hâmedi, Toomaj, the Bahá’ís, or the post-2009 Green Movement detainees will encounter it daily. Treating اوین as “a prison in Tehran” is not wrong; it is incomplete. We give learners the wards, the agencies, and the names so the word lands the way it lands in Iranian Persian.

How to use it

• بردنش اوین (bordanesh evin) “they took him to Evin”
• تو بند ۲۰۹ بود (tu band-e devist-o-noh bud) “he was in Ward 209”
• از اوین آزاد شد (az evin âzâd shod) “he was released from Evin”
• خانواده‌اش جلوی اوین جمع شدن (khânevâdash jelo-ye evin jam’ shodan) “his family gathered outside Evin”

References

• Amnesty International, fire at Evin Prison, October 2022
• Human Rights Watch, Evin Prison fire killed eight, 16 October 2022
• Iran Human Rights Documentation Center
• Wikipedia, Evin Prison (background and ward map)
• Dehkhoda, اوین