An Account of Living in the Village of Forg (One Hundred Kilometers East of Birjand, Southern Khorasan)
I became acquainted with the village of Forg in 1390 (2011), purchased a small house in the village, and its restoration was completed in the summer of 1396 (2017). It reached the finals of the 96th Memar Award in the renovation category. I was asked, on the strength of my experience of living in Forg, to write something about this village. I intend to recount my experience by answering three questions: Why do we, the inhabitants of metropolises, love villages more than the villagers themselves, and how might our gaze upon villages take shape? As a city-dweller, whenever I would shift my view from the jungle of Tehran's buildings to the soothing horizon of the deserts of Southern Khorasan with their mud-domed structures, I would ask myself to which of these two worlds I belonged, and the answer was: to neither. In the words of Will Durant, our bewilderment comes from living between two worlds—one that has vanished (the world of tradition) and another that has just appeared (the modern world)—and our fate for several generations is anxiety. It is usually this very anxiety that draws us to villages, but our gaze upon the village can come from two angles: projection or critique. In the projective gaze, modernity and its manifestations are rejected wholesale, like the hippies of 1960s America who saw the true life in building wooden cabins in the forest and cooking on wood-burning stoves, believing that whoever lives far from the city leads a happier and more blessed existence, and that every illness and discontent stems from urban life. In this view, one can construct an imaginary picture of the village and village life and experience a kind of self-invented rustic existence. But in the critical gaze, one can ask what is absent from the city that makes villages appealing to urbanites, and conversely, what is absent from the village that has turned city life into a dream for the villager. City-dwellers are usually attracted to villages for the climate, the tranquility, the simplicity and sincerity of human relations, the rural architecture, and the cultural and historical dimensions, and in the village they experience a kind of "therapy." But the villager sees problems such as drought and water scarcity, low-yield traditional farming and gardening, limited social connections, cultural poverty and inhibiting traditional beliefs, unemployment, and addiction rates
disproportionately high relative to population, a low level of health and medical care, and a lack of self-confidence and a sense of inferiority vis-a-vis the urban person—altogether a set of perils that have turned the village into a dead end and a source of despair. Thus, if villagers in some aspects of their lives still resemble the villagers of stories and travelogues and postcard photographs, it is because they have no other choice; otherwise, if they could, they would leave no trace of their village identity behind. I must confess that my gaze upon the village, as an architect, was an incomplete one, limited to the natural, historical, and physical perspective, and I am compelled to describe this incomplete view, which only alongside the perspectives of specialists in development and entrepreneurship, health, water and agriculture, sociology, and so on, can represent the condition of a place called the village of Forg.
Where is the village of Forg, and how did it come into being? If you drive one hundred kilometers east from Birjand, you will arrive at the Darmiyan valley amidst the Mu'men Abad heights. There used to be a river in the valley bed that dried up three decades ago, but the valley floor remains distinct from the hot and arid climate of Southern Khorasan in terms of weather and vegetation. The houses of the villages of Darmiyan, unlike the dome-roofed houses of Southern Khorasan, have flat roofs because many trees have existed in this area from the past, and consequently the roofs could be beam-covered. The width of rooms in most Darmiyan houses ranges from 2.5 to 3 meters and the length from 3 to 6 meters, determined by the wooden ceiling beams. Darmiyan once had fruit orchards and fields of barley and wheat that, with the drought, severely diminished; barberry bushes have been planted in place of barley and wheat. Several villages exist in this valley, and at its far end, where the Asadieh plain begins, the village of Forg sits with its lofty fortress. This fortress is architecturally among the finest in the country. The initial nucleus of the village's formation is this very fortress, ranked among the top ten. The construction of the fortress took place in 1747 CE, after the death of Nader Shah Afshar and the fragmentation of Iran. One of Nader's army commanders, Ahmad Durrani, after his death, brought northern Afghanistan and northeastern Iran as far as Mashhad under a single dominion called the Durrani Kingdom.
Defense and preservation of this territory, centered in Herat, required fortifications, and the construction of Forg Fortress was for this very purpose. The prevailing outlook of rulers toward their territory is political, military, and security-oriented, and with this outlook Ahmad Durrani deemed this location suitable for building a fortress. Darmiyan is a fertile and temperate region within the hot and arid geography, one that could serve as a suitable site for provisioning supplies and quartering troops. Forg Fortress, with 9,200 square meters of floor area, was a support fortress for the logistical provisioning of the army. Dr. Forbes, an English physician who visited the fortress in 1841, wrote: "Inside the fortress are cisterns that supply a year and a half's water for a large garrison. The fortress granaries have a capacity of 2,800 kharvar and can provision 30,000 soldiers for one month." After the establishment of the Qajar government and the renewed unification of the realm, the authority of the central government was gradually strengthened. In 1851, Forg Fortress was captured by order of Naser al-Din Shah. Thus the fortress gradually fell into disuse and fortress-dwelling became obsolete. The first houses outside the fortress walls were built in the Houz-e Saravanan neighborhood, and later the neighborhoods of Sardeh, Masjed-e Belal, Pa'in Deh, and Jahkab (Jahkab being the name of one of the village's two qanats) came into existence. Today this five-neighborhood division has been forgotten, and the village is known simply by three neighborhoods: Baladeh, Pa'in Deh, and Miyan Deh. Forg has a population of 250 households. People make their living through farming, barberry harvesting, sheep herding, laboring and masonry, driving, and petty trade. Some of the more prosperous villagers raise poultry, and a handful are government employees. Agricultural lands are irrigated by the water of two qanats, Jahkab and Bid. Twenty-four hours of qanat water is called one share, and each share equals 120 fenjans. The fenjan unit
is bought and sold, and in the past a few fenjans could serve as a bride's dowry, for water has always been equivalent to money. Before the revolution, some 40 carpet-weaving workshops operated in Forg, and the carpets were sold to Italian and French middlemen. But today the weavers number fewer than five, and they use Safavid-era designs of the rizeh-mahi or Mud pattern. The main population of Forg has migrated to Birjand, Zahedan, and Torbat-e Jam. This has left many village houses empty and abandoned, most of them in the older neighborhoods near the fortress. Some houses, usually inheritance properties, have been deserted because the heirs lack the solidarity to maintain and restore them, and unfortunately some have been turned into rubbish heaps. Most residents prefer to move from the upper neighborhoods to the lower ones to face fewer service and transit problems, especially since transporting materials for the development or repair of houses in the upper neighborhoods is more difficult. The hilly topography upon which the fortress sits at the summit has influenced the formation of the main passageways and the development of the houses and even the fine interior spaces, and the solutions devised in the architecture of these houses to address this condition are among the charms of the village fabric. Forg has harsh winters, but for the rest of the year the climate is temperate. Typically, the winter rooms in houses are smaller and have less light, because they have fewer and smaller windows. The summer rooms are larger and brighter with more fluid air circulation, because they have more windows, and as the locals say, in Forg every window is a free cooler. Forg is famous for its fine weather, and instead of saying Forg has good water and air, the people say it has good wind and air. Because of the hilly topography, the spatial structure of the houses is organized at different elevation levels, and the room windows usually face the view of the dry riverbed. The alleys in Forg are narrow and shaded, and there are many covered passageways (sabat) in the village, with the entrances to some
houses located beneath these sabats. If the house is two stories, as the one I restored, the livestock section is on the lower floor and entirely separate from the residential section. The walls on the first floor are made of rubble stone with one-meter-thick mortar joints, and on the second floor of sun-dried brick with 50-centimeter joints. The pattern of a central courtyard and a vestibule from the passageway to the courtyard is visible in most houses. Some houses have a room for baking bread called a tandoor-khaneh, which is usually shared with neighbors.
How was the Forg house restored, and what is its situation within the village? Every house is an expression of the life that once flowed within it. The grand houses in Forg have more rooms, with ornamental details visible on their walls and ceilings; the livestock and crop-storage sections in these houses are more extensive, and the entrance vestibules leading to the central courtyard are more stately. The house I purchased belonged to one of the poorest families in the village, the Akbari family, who were farm laborers (barzegar), and several generations of this family resided in this house over the course of ninety years. In the 1370s (1990s) the owners abandoned the house, and it became a ruin, a rubbish heap, and a haunt for drug addicts. The first time I saw the house was on a night in Khordad of 1390 (June 2011). The house had four stables on the first floor, all filled with garbage, and entry was impossible due to the stench. By means of a staircase from the alley level, we entered a small courtyard on the second floor around which three rooms and a tandoor room were arranged. Gazing at the moon in the clear, vast sky of the village from this small courtyard was immensely charming. In 1395 (2016) I rented a room in the square of the village's congregational mosque and began
restoration work. First we removed the ceilings and floors of the rooms for re-beaming and weight reduction, and interestingly, among the floor joists we discovered old carpet-weaving and farming tools. I first built a scale model of the house; this model helped me and the workers better understand the space, and it always accompanied me on trips between Tehran and Forg. During the restoration days, I was frequently invited by the locals and workers to their homes and attended several mourning and wedding ceremonies. Ceremonies are usually held in the village assembly hall and open to all, which is one of the social assets of village life. The neighbors were happy that the abandoned Akbari house was being restored, and I remember the night the house first received electricity, many came to congratulate and inspect the rooms. The restoration proceeded very slowly; work in the village, since nobody is in a hurry, can be quite agonizing. Whoever you need either has guests, or has gone to irrigate the field, or is ill, or is sleeping, and so on. In the restoration, the tandoor room was rebuilt, a new bathroom and toilet were added to the house, and the former livestock spaces were converted into a kitchen and gallery, connected from inside to the rooms by a staircase. On the last trip to Forg (Mordad 1396 / August 2017), engineer Farshid Nasrabadi accompanied me and photographed the house's spaces. I must also thank Ms. Engineer Avid Saqeb for organizing the information and presenting this project. The Forg house is a cozy, simple, and serene space that welcomes any young architect who wishes to study and reflect upon Forg more deeply. The village's main passageway (Gozar-e Belal) was restored by my teacher, Dr. Akrami, between 1389 and 1391 (2010-2012), and I hope the remaining work will be followed up soon, so that the village of Forg may achieve a better physical condition.