Solace of Lovers. Trost der Liebenden

When the commission assembled, the programme was forgotten; all the dignitaries merely wanted to ask questions designed to demonstrate their own expertise. The first conference was all about pontoons and bridge construction, although there was not a single navigable river nor any timbers suitable for warfare to be found in the whole of the empire. The only practical outcome was the conclusion that each of us would do what we thought best, and that was the wisest thing in the whole consultation. We were each assigned a number of students.

Before I discuss the field of activity of each of the teachers, I would like to describe the overall impression the stay made on us. As we had no knowledge of the language and were therefore restricted to our own company, life was very sad in the beginning. A letter from Europe took about two months to arrive, and telegraph services were no more available then than they are now, hence our existence was not very different from solitary confinement. Add to that some serious acclimatisation disorders, a circumstance which had a very depressing effect on the spirit. Think of our community as being cut in half, with no female creature ever to be seen – because the veiled mummies, which are more like stuffed woolsacks or corked champagne bottles, could not reasonably be counted as women – and you will understand that we newcomers were afflicted with an indescribable melancholy. It is like the rosebush without roses and the nightingale without its song; one is sure to tire of bush and bird. In such a condition the only remedy is either work and study or the bottle. Happy is he who chooses the former!

Moreover, there was another very depressing aspect for our officers. Mindful of their rank, they assumed no other titles than those which were rightly theirs at home; they did not load themselves with gold braid and gilded themselves even less with galvanoplastic trimmings. On the other hand, every Persian of good family enters the army as a Sarhang, i.e. colonel, and so beardless boys looked down disdainfully on lieutenants and captains. As chance would have it, shortly after our arrival some Italian refugees entered Persian service, and they were prudent enough to at least claim the title of colonel and the gold braid.

In this connection I remember well an amusing episode. One day the Grand Vizier sent for me to examine a new colonel in militaribus. The minister handed him a rifle for the drill. From the position with the upper body leaning forward with outstretched arms, I saw immediately that the colonel had at best been serving the fine people of his country with firearms from behind a counter. When the minister remarked with a smile that he was not very familiar with the rifle, the colonel offered the excuse that he had previously served in the cavalry, and he was soon put to good use in that service and later brought some horses to Vienna. In this difficult situation in which some of us found ourselves, our motherland also forgot to enquire about our activities; no questions were asked about us, and no awards were made, which would have elevated everyone in the public eye, especially since the other nationals were in a much more felicitous position. I am not complaining; I merely note the situation which was bound to arise as a result of the ambiguous position of the officers without status. In the case of subsequent appointees, our government seems to have avoided such vexations, and it has not stinted with favours for the returnees, but

“What one wishes in youth,

one has in full when old.”

First Lieutenant Krziz, now Major (Ret’d), resident in Chrudim, is a competent mathematician who, in the tradition of the Austro-Hungarian artillery, took his duties very seriously. At first he had 25 students, whose number later grew to 50. Most of them are now in military service and hold senior positions in the Persian army. Although, as mentioned above, the artillery was initially organised by the British, it was Krziz who taught theory as well as practice and wrote definitive Persian-language textbooks for all disciplines, thus providing a solid foundation for future teaching. Given the limited availability of books in the Orient compared to the Occident, every book is highly esteemed; indeed they even go so far as to recognise every religion whose statutes are written down in a book as Saheb-e Ketab, meaning owner of a book, and thus legitimate, while the others are considered idolatry.

For nine years Krziz taught arithmetic, algebra, geometry, mechanics, physics, chemistry, artillery theory and so on; he performed practical measurements of peaks and valleys, supervised the construction of artillery batteries and redoubts and improved the workings of the arsenal – in short, a wealth of specialist work, which it would take too long to enumerate. I must nevertheless mention a number of notable achievements: Krziz drew a precise map of Tehran, 100 paces to the inch, and although the city has since been greatly extended to the northeast, it remains a permanent asset because the presence of so many harems meant that accurate surveying was only possible under particularly favourable conditions. He also mapped the surroundings of the city, at 1,000 paces to the inch, from the Alborz range to the ancient city of Ray in the south. The demanding work on these maps could only be completed with the help of his students. He also measured the highest peak of the Alborz Mountains near Tehran, putting its height at 12,000 feet, and performed a trigonometric survey using barometers and thermometers of Mount Damavand, one of the highest and most majestic mountains in the world, calculating its height at almost 20,000 feet.

If we look at recent maps of Persia, we find telegraph lines serving all points of the compass, one connecting with Europe via Tbilisi, Baghdad and Egypt and another with the Indian telegraph system by cable and wire via Baluchestan. These lines were all constructed in the period after 1860, but Krziz was the first to construct a telegraph line, albeit only 800 metres in length, and the interesting thing about it is that he made all the equipment himself or had it made by craftsmen in Tehran; only the wire was drawn in Isfahan. The apparatus was of the electro-magnetic type, with a Daniell cell used to supply the current. After nine years, Krziz retired from Persian service and published “Die Beschreibung, wissenschaftliche Zergliederung und Gebrauchsweise des persisch-arabischen Astrolabiums” (Greifswalde) (Description, Scientific Structure and Use of the Persian-Arab Astrolabe). This was a mathematical achievement of great significance, as Asian astronomers used this instrument for their work. His activities have left their mark on the recent cultural history of Persia and are a credit to our country.

Far more limited in their impact were the activities of the other officers. This was due partly to the disciplines involved and partly to the circumstances. In most cases they had no option but to complain that they were not being provided with the necessary men and weapons for training and drill, to which the Grand Vizier would give his standard reply: “If the salary is paid, there can be no cause for complaint.” Indeed, every European who feels the urge to achieve something must be willing to procure the materials himself; all that is officially expected of him is his presence.

Captain Gumoens, a Swiss, looked to find the orderly conditions of the Austrian army everywhere, so he stumbled at every straw and every straw caused him to fall. Mirza Shafi has words for his case:

“No-one ever lends an ear / When you start: I’m wisest here!

So if you want the men to learn / Make adaptation your concern.”

He left the service in his second year.

Captain Zatti of the Military Engineers was a capable but eccentric man who soon found himself at odds with the conditions in Persia, but he did make some significant and major improvements to the arsenal. After one year’s service, he accidentally died from carbon monoxide poisoning. It was my task to determine the cause of death by dissection – the first dissection ever to be performed in Persia, regrettably on a fellow countryman. Although First Lieutenant Nemiró had a talent for getting on well with the Persians and was a popular figure in their circles, his mission – to train a regular cavalry battalion – was difficult, if not impossible. Because of the horses, cavalry service requires punctuality, and this was simply not to be had. The Asian does not need to be fed and is content even without pay; in his frugality he finds food, wood and shelter everywhere. That does not apply to the horses; they need to be provided for on a regular basis. Their riders were often forced to pawn their steeds and weapons, and during manoeuvres had to make do with caravan nags pour l’honneur du drapeau. After his departure, the regular cavalry was dissolved again, and rightly so, for they would always cut a sorry figure compared with the excellent irregular cavalry. A few years later, Nemiró travelled to Persia for a second time but died on the outward journey. With his command of the Persian language limited to his needs in the way of food and drink, he left no books to posterity.

The mineralogist Czarnotta, who was highly expert in his field, had the misfortune to be a spiritualist; he was always plagued by mountain spirits. A deeply mistrustful person, he sought to conceal every find. He always marked them with ciphers of his own invention lest someone try to rob him of his claim to priority. He explored the mineral treasures on Mount Damavand and in August 1853 decided to climb it. Out of sheer fear of being murdered, he climbed the mountain without a guide, lost his way, and had to spend the night in a solfatare to avoid freezing to death. The villagers sent after him found him frozen stiff and carried him back down. When he recovered, he treated the harmless people as thieves and murderers and demanded that they be punished. A few months later he undertook another expedition; a broken and mentally disturbed man, he spurned the use of quinine in a severe bout of malaria and died from the fever. His extensive collection and records were all found to be in encoded form. They were sent to Europe but were lost en route without trace. A sad outcome for science!

To complete the picture, I hope I will be forgiven for saying a few words about myself. I was assigned 22 students, whom I was to train to become Hakims (doctors). I sought to discharge my duties more efficiently by quickly learning the Persian language. After eight months, I was in a position to teach without the help of an interpreter. One of my paramount duties was to establish the terminology, and I consider this arduous task to be my greatest achievement, because the right word for a particular concept is the basis for all future research and progress. It was in no way my ambition to produce fully qualified doctors; the individual is much too weak for that, and I lacked the necessary teaching materials. I merely wished to lay the foundations for an enlightened understanding of nature and to train doctors to the level of the barber surgeons formerly produced by our basic courses at home, some of whom could then continue their training at a European university, as was later the case. I taught anatomy from a skeleton, specimens, drawings and animal dissections, as well as physiology, external and internal pathology and oculistics; I also had the manuals in each subject lithographed. During the numerous operations I performed – I conducted 156 operations for stones, for example – I was attended and assisted by my students, some of whom became very good surgeons and are still frequently consulted – even by Europeans – today. I was the first in Persia to perform painless surgery using anaesthesia, to the astonishment of all.

There were no military physicians in Persia, nor were there any civil or military hospitals. In military campaigns the seriously wounded usually perish. The stuffed scalps of the enemy are placed on pikes and carried home as trophies. The fact that many a scalp of one’s own soldiers also finds its way into the collection is an excusable failing in the quest for gloire. My ambition was to build a military hospital, and after some difficulties I was successful. When the building was finished, however, I was provided with neither gowns nor straw sacks nor sheets, beds being considered unnecessary in a country where everyone sleeps on the ground in any case, and the soldiers refused to perform guard and attendant duties because they said they had only been recruited for war. After significant sacrifices of time and my own money, I had to abandon the project as an impossibility; however, as I have since heard by letter, the idea was taken up again and the first model hospital is now in use for sick soldiers. I also sent a good student to the area around Zanjan in order to improve the lot of the unfortunate lepers there. This disease, once widespread in Europe – hence the leprosariums – is still to be found in some parts of northwest Persia; the unfortunates – rightly expelled from their towns and villages – live miserable lives in wretched mud huts far from all human settlement. Here, too, I found that the food the king had arranged to be distributed to the unfortunates was charged for but never delivered. This is how Orientals are: they would never refuse a morsel of bread to the hungry, not even to a dog, even if it meant going without themselves, but they have no compunction about depriving the absent of their rights.

Upon the death in 1855 of Dr. Cloquet from the famous Cloquet family of scholars, I was appointed royal personal physician, Muqarrab al-Khaqan (Privy Councillor) and also General in partibus infidelium. My duties from then on were both difficult and simple, as one takes it, for I was not born to be a courtier. I strove to teach the otherwise healthy king and to give him a good grounding in history, geography and the like; I also taught him the French language, in which he is now quite proficient. Since, like all Austrians, I took pride in never begging for anything, the emoluments were hardly adequate in relation to the manifold services provided. Sometimes my functions were heterogeneous. When I once accompanied the king to an artillery target shooting exercise, for example, he ordered me to aim a cannon. I was so happy not to have killed any of the attendants standing around the target!

In the spring of 1860, I returned to Europe. As I had written books, had saved the lives of many poor people by operating on them, was versed in Persian calembours and had also dabbled in poetry, I left behind a memory secured through deeds and words – or so I believe.

Since that time, in addition to my practice, I have continued to occupy myself with Persia; I have acclimatised various plants, written a book about the country and its people (Leipzig 1865) and other medical and technical essays for scientific journals, because through my dealings with all social classes and my travels I became better acquainted with the country and its products than other Europeans and even natives. This made it possible for me to write a manual for participation in the World’s Fair, where I was appointed Imperial Austrian Commissioner, which was translated into Persian and sent to Tehran as a guide for the Persian delegation4. In addition, I sought to contribute to that global undertaking by writing the catalogue and the official exhibition report.

Finally, I would beg you to excuse many a word of self-praise, not with Goethe’s saying about modesty but with a tame xenia from the “West-Eastern Diwan”:

“Before, the boast was not your style.

Where have you learnt to boast the while?

The Orient taught me the boast’s essentials:

But now I’m back on western ground,

where to my relief I find and found

some hundreds who are Orientals.”

I would also like to say a few words about our successors, the last-but-not-leasts who were certainly not epigones but whose work was facilitated by the active support provided by the Austrian legation since established there.

Shortly after our departure, Dervish Hermann Vámbéry arrived in the country. He visited several parts of the empire and various cities as a dervish and also spent a few months in Tehran in the Turkish legation hotel in order to prepare for his long journey to Bukhara, Samarkand and Herat. The art of understanding foreign customs and circumstances may be something that Vámbéry shares with many others, but what makes him so special is his ability to adapt to foreign customs, traditions and languages so well that he can be taken for a native and can even play the part of the dervish minstrel and endure hunger, thirst, heat or the third Egyptian plague. The range of his experiences was so overwhelming that one was initially tempted to consider the reports apocryphal. Whereas the re-habilitation of Marco Polo was a process that lasted centuries, in our fast-living age a few years and confirmation from Russian and Asian witnesses – for the mountain came to Muhammad – were enough to bring the truth to light. Vámbéry is rightly regarded as the leading authority on Central Asia – including Afghanistan and its neighbouring countries – but he also has an open eye for Iran. Should a commemorative coin be struck in his honour, I would propose the following inscription by analogy with Sassanian coins: Hekim Ilan u Anilan, i.e. researcher on Iran and Turan.

In 1860, the Tyrolean engineer Gasteiger took service in Persia as a muhendis (engineer and pioneer). As is well known, there were no paved roads in Persia; the caravans followed the tracks that had been trodden for thousands of years. The mostly dry ground, the excellent quality of the horses and the limited amount of traffic made roads more dispensable than elsewhere. “If you had such good horses in Europe as we have,” the king once said to me, “you would also have poor roads.” Shah Abbas the Great did have paved roads (Khiaban) built on more difficult terrain, such as in the marshlands, on the Caspian Sea and in the Qaflankuh Mountain Range, and he also sought to facilitate transport through the construction of monumental Caravanserais, but as they have not been maintained for more than two centuries, they can hardly serve their purpose anymore. The present king has had short stretches of road built but only to serve a country retreat or hunting ground.

I myself was once a witness to such improvised road construction. We were riding with the king on a hunt in the mountains. The ascent was rough under foot and strewn with loose stones, and the king complained about the poor state of the track; when we returned a few hours later, however, about a hundred men were busy clearing the ground. The sudden appearance of all these people in such barren countryside was a mystery, but it was soon resolved: they were petitioners from the nearby villages, whom the minister had pressganged for a useful purpose in the meantime.

Soon after his arrival, Gasteiger assembled a pioneer corps of 600 men and deployed them to construct the following important roads: 1. a road across the Alborz Mountains (11,500 feet above sea level) via Shahrestanak to Aliabad on the Caspian Sea, 18 German miles; 2. a road from Qazvin to Rasht, height of the pass at Khersun 7,500 feet; 3. on the occasion of the king’s pilgrimage to Karbala near Baghdad, a road to Hamadan over the Alvand (6,000 feet) via Kangavar to the Turkish border and on the return journey from Kangavar to Qom, a total of 120 German miles; 4. a road from Tehran via Damavand city to Amol in Mazandaran Province. Everywhere in the mountains, rock had to be blasted and tunnels excavated and parapets had to be built for protection. The abundance of box trees in Mazandaran is evidenced by the fact that the parapets were often made of this precious wood. Special attention had to be paid in the mountains to installations offering protection against snowdrifts. Gasteiger was also widely involved in the construction of the Anglo-Indian telegraph, and in his book the famous General Goldsmith lavishes impartial praise on Gasteiger’s felicitous work. The latter also enjoyed full royal recognition; he was made a general and Khan, and he had the honour of accompanying the king on his journey through Europe (1873). He now lives in otium cum dignitate in Vienna. As the study of the geology of Persia has not yet made the same progress as in the case of botany, I arranged in 1873 for Dr. Tietze from our world-famous geological institute to travel to Persia, initially on behalf of Baron Reuter, the entrepreneur behind the Persian railways. Later he took royal service. Investigations in the Alborz Mountains, the Siah-Kuh, the mountain range between Kashan, Khansar and Isfahan and the discovery of rich coal and ore deposits are the fruits of his efforts, the details of which will only be fully known to the scholarly world following study of the crystals and fossils he brought back with him.

In 1874, the Royal Persian Government asked the Austro-Hungarian Government to recommend two capable men to organise the postal system and national mint. As a result of the negotiations, Postal Councillor Riederer of Linz and Councillor Pech of the Vienna Mint entered into Persian service for three years.

According to Herodotus, Persia already had an organised postal system. From station to station, a relay of couriers was placed to carry parcels day and night. According to the Book of Esther, the distances from Hind to Kush (from India to Nubia) were enormous. Like other state institutions, this one also disappeared with the decline of the Great Persian Empire and was replaced by privately employed or freelance messengers on foot or on horseback. It was not until the present king came to the throne (1848) that post houses were established with a few government horses at approximate intervals of five German miles to transport state and diplomatic parcels. Private letters were also transported depending on the circumstances, but there was no fixed postage. Also, the letters often arrived damaged and opened, so that private persons could not place their trust in such an erratic system. The speed with which the government couriers were able to reach their destination, even though there was only a change of horses and not riders, can be illustrated by the following examples: the distance from Tehran to Trebizond is about 200 German miles and to Bandar-e Bushehr a little less, and yet the former was covered in ten days and the latter in nine.

There could hardly have been a more worthy choice for organising this essential state institution than Riederer, a man of great strength and energy, with a passion to create something new. He took advantage of his outward journey to confer in Tbilisi about the connections to be arranged and to learn about the principal commercial cities and their needs with regard to services. Shortly after his arrival in the capital, he organised post offices, recruited competent officials who knew the relevant languages, had stamps printed and set the postage at a reasonable rate.

Up to now he has succeeded in running a weekly scheduled mail service with a change of couriers over a total distance of 144 German miles on the northern lines. The service is used to carry simple correspondence, registered letters, money and small consignments of valuables. He also instituted a very practical system of telegraphic communication for sending money from one city to another, with merchants paying out the sums forwarded for a charge of half a percent, thus introducing the beneficial institution of postal money orders to Asia. The confidence of the business community in these innovations has already been demonstrated by expressions of gratitude, a testimony that is all the more eloquent as the business community maintains a certain independence and does not give thanks to order. A major obstacle to proper administration will always be the fact that in oriental cities the streets have no names, the houses no numbers and the individuals no surnames, which makes it almost impossible to reach them in their homes.

Riederer has also endeavoured to link the domestic postal system with those of other countries, especially to establish a direct connection to Russia and Turkey via Trebizond. Given the mutual benefits, the remaining difficulties should soon be overcome. From the results obtained in this short period of time, it can be expected that the new Persian service will not commence before all the post houses on the main lines and the connections with Europe, Mesopotamia and India have been established (cf. Monatsschrift für den Orient, no. 12, 1875: “Das Postwesen in Persien” by Dr. J. E. Polak).