جنگل

The Hyrcanian forests (جنگل‌های هیرکانی, jangalhâ-ye hirkâni) along Iran's Caspian coast are a UNESCO World Heritage site, a 50-million-year-old ancient forest that survived the Ice Ages. Beech, hornbeam, oak, and the Caspian tiger habitat (now extinct) defined the region. For Tehrani Iranians, شمال ("the north," meaning the Caspian) is the standard summer destination, and جنگل is what you go there for. The cultural register around جنگل is different from European forest traditions: there is little fairytale-dark-woods folklore in Persian. The forest is a refuge and a vacation, not the dangerous edge of the human world. Modern environmental writing in Persian frequently uses جنگل as shorthand for what is being lost to logging and fire. There is also a phrase, قانون جنگل (qânun-e jangal, "the law of the jungle"), that political columnists reach for when describing a breakdown of order. And the place name جنگل (Jangal) shows up in Iranian history through the Jangali Movement of the 1910s, a guerrilla constitutional uprising in Gilan led by Mirza Kuchek Khan, whose fighters used the forest cover as their base.