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Shahr-e No (Persian: شهرنو, "New City") was the red light district located in Gomrok, a south-western district of Tehran, Iran. It appeared in the 1920s and was destroyed in 1979; it employed about 1,500 women.[1] Its location is now replaced with a park and a hospital.
History
editProstitution in Tehran is known to have existed since the 1870s in various locations of the city (brothels were indicated by a lantern). During the following forty years, prostitutes gradually became more visible, displaying themselves in the streets. In March 1922, the government's interior ministry, then non-religious, organized a partial roundup of prostitutes and assembled them in Shahr-e No, an area close to the citadel. Tehran's other prostitutes joined them in the next eleven years, then Shahr-e No was circled with a 2.50 m high brick wall, with women being forbidden from leaving this area. After the Iranian revolution and the establishment of Islamic regime, in July 1979 a crowd which witnessed the death sentence of three women accused of procuring assaulted the district, burned the brothels, persecuted women and spread terror. At this time the area sprawled over 13 ha and hosted 1500 women, 753 street sellers, 178 shops and two theaters. The next year after Ayatollah Khomeini emerged as the Supreme Leader of Iran, the government demolished the red light district and flattened it with bulldozers, only leaving a barren area.[2] Hooman Majd, author of The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, said that the Iranian government did this for Islamic reasons and to demonstrate the government's authority.[3] The Islamic Republic then strove to erase all memory of it, destroying books and movies which mentioned its existence. The city's maps are marked with a rectangle captioned: "parc in construction".[4] Only rare witness accounts remain, such as the photographic series The Citadel by Iranian photojournalist Kaveh Golestan.[1] The area wasn't refurbished until 1998, with a city park and a hospital.[5][6][7]
References
edit- ^ a b "Iranian photojournalist Kaveh Golestan's Prostitute Series at Photo London". The Telegraph. Retrieved 22 May 2015.
- ^ "Bulldozers Smash Tehran Bordellos." Los Angeles Times. 26 February 1980. B5. Retrieved on 6 October 2009.
- ^ Majd, Hooman. "Persian Cats." The Ayatollah Begs to Differ. 2008. Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-52334-9. 26.
- ^ Bahàr Majdzàdeh, Cartographier les exclus : géographie de la destruction (Iran 1979-1988). Contre-cartographier le monde, Presses Universitaires de Limoges (PULIM), pp.193-202, 2021. ffhal-03669725f read online
- ^ Article by Luis Alemany, "La terrible destruction du quartier rouge de Téhéran", Courrier international, no 1680, 12-18 january 2023, p. 47, translation of an article published in El Mundo in january 2023.
- ^ "Photos: Tehran's brothel district Shahr-e-No 1975-77 by Kaveh Golestan". Payvand. Archived from the original on 2023-01-19. Retrieved 2023-01-19.
- ^ Content in this edit is translated from the existing French Wikipedia article at fr:Shahr-e No; see its history for attribution.
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