The ‘geobiography’ of an extraordinary artifact, or a conserved relic from the Iranianized ‘Dacha’ culture

Abstract

Since one of cultural geography’s aims is to understand how human cultures influence the landscape, the geobiography of a modest artifact can be a readable clue concerning a larger cultural context. This article discusses how diasporic cultural mobility finds its way from the place of origin to the place of settlement. The story begins in Soviet Russia in the twilight of the 1930s when the Red Revolution has driven many people to flee their homeland and continues in Iran before and during World War II. A family of White emigrants from Ukraine came to Iran in the 1930s. They tried to relive sweet memories of distant years in the village of Damavand outside Tehran by finding a Russian-style summer residence, ‘dacha’, in the context of Iranian culture and geographical territory. In late Summer 1941, a taxi driver entrusted an old engraved copper pot to them as a guarantee to return and take them to Tehran, which Allied forces had occupied. Four generations have continuously cared for this unbreakable relic, whose story, valued much more than the object itself, illustrates the cultural dynamics of migration in the form of portable property. A geobiographical approach helps us better understand diasporic cultural practices in a new socio-cultural context: 1930s–40s Iran.