کرمان

What it means / Where it is

کرمان (kermân) is the capital of Kerman province in southeastern Iran. The province is the largest in the country by area and one of the most thinly populated. The city itself sits on a high plateau, with summers that bake and winters that genuinely freeze.

Cultural-historical context

Kerman has a long urban history. It was an important stop on the trade routes connecting the Iranian plateau with the Indian Ocean ports, and the old citadel of ارگ بم (arg-e bam), in the same province, was for centuries one of the largest mud-brick complexes on earth before the 2003 earthquake. The bazaars and caravanserais of central Kerman still preserve traces of that commercial past.

The province is built on minerals. Sarcheshmeh, south of the capital, is one of the world’s largest copper mines, and Iran’s national copper industry runs through it. The Kerman desert also holds the شهداد (shahdâd) region, where the Lut desert reaches some of the highest surface temperatures ever recorded on the planet, and the Shahdad meteorite-fall site is a familiar destination for Iranian astronomy clubs.

For most Iranians today, Kerman is also strongly associated with قاسم سلیمانی (qâsem soleymâni), the IRGC Quds Force commander killed in a US drone strike in Baghdad in January 2020. He was born in a village in Kerman province and was buried in his hometown of Kerman after enormous state-organized funerals. The name of the city now triggers that recent memory for almost every Iranian, regardless of how they feel about the man.

How to use it

• اهل کرمانم (ahl-e kermân-am) “I am from Kerman”
• پسته کرمان معروفه (peste-ye kermân ma’rufe) “Kerman pistachios are famous”
• به کرمان سفر کردیم (be kermân safar kardim) “We traveled to Kerman”

Pistachios are the other thing Kerman is known for. Rafsanjan, also in the province, supplies a large share of Iran’s pistachio crop, and the small, deep-green Kerman variety is what most Iranians mean when they say پسته. The local sweet is کلمپه (kolompe), a stuffed cookie of dates and walnuts that travels well and shows up in every Kermani family’s New Year spread.

Linguistically, the province is more diverse than the capital city suggests. Persian is the dominant language, but in the southern districts you also hear Balochi, and the old Zoroastrian villages around the city preserve a regional dialect known as گویش زرتشتی (guyesh-e zartoshti). The Kermani Persian accent itself is recognizable to other Iranians: slower than Tehrani, with a softer rhythm that locals will tell you is shaped by the desert.

References

• Dehkhoda
• Vajehyab
• Encyclopaedia Iranica