The street is covered by varied types of arches, with gray bricks laid into delicate geometrical patterns. The apexes of the domes have a small circular opening, designed to facilitate a minimal change of air. They shoot narrow shafts of light that draw a line in the dusty air, like pillars of light supporting the vaults.

I am walking down the main corridor in the bazaar of Isfahan, the former capital of Iran. The passage meanders for two kilometres, with densely packed shops, bartering customers and men pulling metal carts filled with carpets competing for space.

The typical bazaar shop simply consist of barren room, lined from floor to ceiling with goods, and a shopkeeper somewhere in between, traditionally with a listless and indifferent expression. A picture of a father or uncle, the person who originally set up the store peers from a picture on the wall, keeping an eye on his succession. The vendors make little effort to differentiate their stores from their neighbours with signs or labels, as passers-by are directly confronted with the colour and scent of what is on sale.

As I walk further into the bazaar I pass clusters of shops selling goods of the same type. People making their living selling plastic buckets take up one small corridor, as do the mandatory pushy carpet merchants, and the sellers of suspicious rubber bands for textiles with global brands written on them.

The area specialized on handicrafts is filled with sound of tinkering and banging, reverberating like an industrial hall with erratic machines. Men are sitting outside their shops hammering their bronze and brass plates or vases into shape and carefully adding new decorative patterns.

One of the craftsmen points my attention to the metalwork of a neighbouring shop. The shallow carvings, he claims, are a sign of industrial imports from India. Not even the exquisite walls of the bazaar offer protection from the outside economic forces.

(a column for nef’s Radical Economics magazine, the pictures are actually from Tehran and Yazd)

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