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Updated: May 5, 2025
The latter is the best looking of the three, and certainly possesses the greatest influence in state affairs. With the exception of eunuchs, no male person over the age of ten is permitted in the seraglio, or anderoon, which is constantly receiving fresh importations from the provinces. Persians deny that there are any European women, but this is doubtful.
I was enabled, thanks to my host, to glean some interesting facts concerning the latter, many European ladies having, from time to time, resided in Shiráz, and, obtaining access to the "anderoon," had afterwards given Mr. F the benefit of their observations. Persian women are unquestionably allowed more freedom and liberty than those of other Oriental countries.
Though a few are highly educated, the majority of Persian women are ignorant, indolent, and sensual. Mariages de convenance are as common as in France, and have a good deal to do with the immorality and intrigue that go on in the larger cities. An eye-witness thus describes an "anderoon," or harem, of a prince in Ispahán: "A large courtyard some thirty yards by ten in extent.
Hundreds of women-wives, concubines, slaves, and domestics are understood to be dwelling within these palace walls in charge of sable eunuchs, and the fate of any female whose bump of discretion in an evil moment fails her, is to be hurled headlong from the summit of one of the anderoon towers such, at least, is the popular belief in Teheran; it may or may not be an exaggeration.
The square towers of the royal anderoon which the Shah professes to believe is the tallest dwelling-house in the world loom conspicuously skyward above the mass of indefinable mud buildings and walls that characterize the habitations of humbler folk, but perhaps happier on the whole than the fair occupants of that seven-storied gilded prison.
Remonstrances proving of no avail, and being unable to force our passage through the narrow doorway with the bicycles in our hands, we dropped them, and grappled with our antagonists. A noisy scuffle, and then a heavy fall ensued, but luckily we were both on the upper side. This unusual disturbance now brought out the inmates of the adjoining anderoon.
Here, on summer afternoons, with the chastened daylight peeping through a stained- glass window in the roof, and carpeting the white marble floor with rainbow hues, with the only entrance to the cool and massive marble court, guarded by armed retainers, who while guarding it were conscious of guarding their own precious lives, Fattehali Shah was wont to beguile the hours away by making merry with the bewitching nymphs of his anderoon, transforming them for the nonce into naiads.
Some even assert that the Shah's chief object in building the anderoon so high was to have the certainty of this awful doom ever present before its numerous inmates, the more easily to keep them in a submissive frame of mind.
Picnics, music, story-telling, kalyan and cigarette smoking, sweetmeat-making, and the bath, together with somewhat less innocent pastimes, form the sum total of a Persian concubine's amusements. Outside the walls of the anderoon they are closely watched and guarded, for Persians are jealous of their women, and, even in the most formal social gatherings, there is a strict separation of the sexes.
Intellectual occupation or amusement of any kind is unknown in the anderoon, and the obscene conversation and habits of its inmates worse even than those of the harems of Constantinople and Cairo, which, according to all accounts, is saying a good deal.
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