What it means
صراف (sarraf) is the Persian word for a money changer. Not a banker, not an exchange bureau employee, a sarraf: the man in a narrow shop in the bazaar with a glass counter, a calculator, a phone ringing every two minutes, and a chalkboard or LED panel posting today’s rial-to-dollar, rial-to-euro, rial-to-dirham rate. The trade is old. The trade is also politically loaded. In modern Iran, sarrafs operate in the gray zone between the official Central Bank rate and the street rate, and the gap between those two numbers is sometimes the entire story of the economy.
The historic heart of the trade in Tehran is the Sabzeh Meydan area at the entrance of Bazaar-e Bozorg, in and around what locals call Bazaar-e Sarrafha. Walk in on a quiet morning and you will see ten shops within thirty meters, each with the same chalkboard, each with a man behind the counter checking his phone.
How to use it
Sarraf is the person. The shop is صرافی (sarrafi). Iranians say I am going to the sarrafi when they need to change dollars, not I am going to the bank, because the bank gives you a rate nobody believes in.
raftam pish-e sarraf, gofteh nerkh emruz balatar rafteh.
I went to the money changer, he said the rate has gone up today.
رفتم پیش صراف، گفت نرخ امروز بالاتر رفته.
baba-m chehel sal sarraf bud tu bazaar-e tehran.
My father was a money changer in the Tehran bazaar for forty years.
بابام چهل سال صراف بود تو بازار تهران.
The trade today
Post-sanctions Iran has been hard on the sarrafs. Periodic crackdowns shut down shops, arrest the owners on charges of disrupting the foreign exchange market, then loosen again when the government needs the gray market to absorb pressure. The trade survives because the country runs on it. Every Iranian family with a child abroad has a sarraf they trust. Every business importing parts has a sarraf on speed dial. The shop looks small. The book of clients is not.
Where it comes from
Sarraf is an Arabic-origin word from the root ص-ر-ف (s-r-f), which carries the sense of turning, exchanging, spending. Arabic سَرَّاف is the intensive active participle, literally one who exchanges as a profession. Persian borrowed the word during the long medieval contact with Arabic commercial vocabulary and kept it in the trade vocabulary of the bazaar. The same root gives صرف (sarf, expenditure) and مصرف (masraf, consumption).
In our voice
The sarraf is a Tehrani institution, half merchant, half informal banker, fully indispensable. If you want to understand how Iran actually moves money, you do not read Central Bank reports. You walk into a shop in Sabzeh Meydan and watch.
References
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