Somewhere in Europe tonight, a cook will pull out a jar of saffron and read a Spanish label on threads grown in Khorasan.
The pomegranate, native to the Iranian plateau and staple of our Yalda night, became the flagship of a billion-dollar California company. Dubai built the world’s most viral dessert around pistachio cream made from a nut whose very name stems from Persian.
Others profit off stories that could have been ours, had our country been led by people who wanted to sell the world something other than ideology and proxy wars. For 47 years, the Islamic Republic has occupied the space where Iran’s name should be.
In 1934, Reza Shah Pahlavi invited scholars worldwide to the Ferdowsi Millennium Congress and raised a mausoleum at Tus, on the principle that a nation capable of hosting its poet’s thousandth birthday has a claim on the future. My grandfather watched him rebuild Iran’s identity through culture.
In 1940, he entered Iran’s first school of architecture and watched old city walls give way to modern avenues and civic institutions built by him and his contemporaries. For him, defining national identity meant a tangible building program and a resurrection that forged the modern Iranian soul.
My father grew up inside the cultural cosmopolitanism that Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and Empress Farah built on that foundation.
Before the state sent him to Rome to study architecture, he witnessed the founding of the Iranian National Ballet and saw its prima ballerina, Haideh Ahmadzadeh, dance on the same stage where Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev performed as guests at Rudaki Hall, an opera house that hosted world-acclaimed artists.
It was my father’s classical music cassettes, which we used to listen to at home while I was growing up in Tehran, that inspired me to become a musician. The institutions built in my grandfather’s era, and the cultural opening of my father’s, did more than define their own time; they planted seeds deep enough to reach across decades and shape an entire generation of Iranian artists.
In that same decade, Iran hosted one of the 20th century’s most ambitious arts festivals in Shiraz. Yehudi Menuhin, Arthur Rubinstein, and Martha Argerich performed alongside ta’zieh drama artists, the radif masters of Persian classical music and naqqali storytellers.
Iannis Xenakis composed “Persephassa” and “Persepolis.” Peter Brook staged Orghast using passages in ancient Avestan. Maurice Béjart choreographed Golestan of Sa’di and “Farah” on Rumi, touring them across Europe.
Jerzy Grotowski left a permanent mark on Iranian theatrical language, just as Iranian ritual performance influenced him and Brook to carry it into “The Conference of the Birds,” adapted from Attar.
The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA) hosted a 3,000-piece work collection, including Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, and Francis Bacon, alongside Iranian titans Bahman Mohasses and Monir Farmanfarmaian. Tehran was operating in the same vibrant present tense as New York and Paris.
Today, that collection, valued at over three billion dollars, sits mostly in a basement vault.
In 1977, Firouz Bagherzadeh, founder of the Iranian Centre for Archaeological Research, was elected as the first chairman of UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee.
Persepolis was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1979, the very year Sadegh Khalkhali, the revolution’s “hanging judge,” arrived with bulldozers to destroy it, and local villagers blocked the roads to stop him. What followed was a “closed for renovation” sign placed on a millennia-old civilization.
Telling our own stories
The regime closed universities, banned music, silenced female singers, dissolved the ballet, demoted our opera house to a venue for state-sanctioned events, buried world-class art, censored artists, and jailed scholars. It replaced cultural diplomacy with a seminary network later sanctioned as a Quds Force recruitment hub.
Yet the regime failed to touch the roots. Today, Generation Z in Iran recites the poet Ferdowsi, fully aware of what it means to invoke Kaveh the Blacksmith raising his apron against a tyrant.
Thousands make the pilgrimage to Pasargadae to stand at Cyrus’s tomb on Nowruz, and at the graves of fallen heroes, mourners wear white and dance, turning grief into a statement of vengeance.
Are we witnessing a cultural renaissance preceding the collapse of the Islamic Republic? I don’t believe so, because that term grants the regime a weight it never earned. A 47-year failed attempt to erase a culture is merely an interruption in a millennia-old story. Iran does not need to be reborn; it needs to resume its trajectory of progress and prosperity.
In April, I conducted the Thessaloniki State Symphony Orchestra with German-Jewish violinist Liv Migdal.
We performed Hossein Dehlavi’s 1975 ballet Bijan and Manijeh, based on Ferdowsi’s “Shahnameh,” telling of an Iranian hero and a Turanian princess whose love transcends the enmity of warring lands; Paul Ben-Haim’s 1942 “Evocation (Yizkor),” a memorial prayer composed as Europe’s Jews were being murdered; and Richard Strauss’s “Death and Transfiguration.”
In Tehran, this entire collaboration would be branded treason, because decades of state propaganda and promoted hatred were exposed as a multi-billion-dollar failure on that stage. Liv carried October 7, 2023, and I carried January 8 and 9, 2026, but it was something more than a shared grief that bonded us.
The program ended with Strauss’s depiction of a dying man rising above life’s tragedy into transcendence and transfiguration. If contemporary tragedies can unite us so deeply on stage, imagine what thousands of years of shared history could yield. Once the Cyrus Accords restore regional security, culture will serve as the vehicle to reignite a kinship spanning millennia.
Under the Pahlavis, culture served as the foundation of national identity and international dialogue. The next chapter belongs to a free Iran that not only gets back on that track but also converts its cultural capital into economic power. Heritage tourism alongside international arts festivals will drive unprecedented revenue and global investments.
The country’s diverse terrain offers unbeatable filming hubs for global studios, while UNESCO Creative Cities could partner with world fashion houses on Persian textiles and luxury goods.
Entertainment giants could tap Persian mythology to build the next global media franchises, or loan TMoCA’s iconic vault of Western masterpieces for global exhibitions, paired with artist residencies across Iran’s provinces, could rebrand the nation and generate wealth on an unprecedented scale.
History is occasionally generous. Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, offering a transition plan to a free, secular, and democratic Iran, carries not only the hopes of millions of Iranians but also the legacy of the family that built Iran’s institutional foundation for culture. He represents a return to Iran’s oldest mechanism of self-definition: its culture.
Before Iran had embassies, it had Gosans, the poet-musician minstrels of the Parthian age who traveled to sing the joys and sorrows of the people, the battles and feasts of kings, and the victories and defeats of heroes. This nation’s story was first told by its artists.
Nations do not choose whether they are branded; they only choose whether to author their own image or surrender it to others. Our story was never the Islamic Republic’s to tell. A nation that sacrificed it all to raise its flag high has already reclaimed the pen.
The writer is an Iranian conductor, composer, researcher, and adviser in cultural policy.