The Forgotten Nomadic Women

These women learned to get by on their own, when their men would leave for months at a time to fight alongside the Shah’s troops. They CAN RIDE, HUNT AND SHOOT… The nomadic women of Iran enjoy a level of autonomy their urban counterparts lack. Yet, their survival is in danger

- Manon Querouil

Perched on a horse, a hieratic figure draped in black crosses a stretch of river. It looks like a scene straight from the Book of Kings, the 10th-century epic poem on the history of Persia by Abolqasem Ferdowsi. Since then, not much has changed for the Bakhtiari and the Qashqa’i, the two largest tribal groups of Iran, who make the same long journey with their herds of sheep from the Northern pastures of Shiraz down to the lands bordering the Persian gulf. ‘Ashayer’ is the Persian word used to describe the nomadic people, evoking visions of arid deserts, mountains reaching into the heavens, faces weathered by a long history. They became the heroes of the Constitutional Revolution of 1905. They fought against the British during WW2, took arms against the Russians and have resisted attacks against the central Iranian government – both envious of the influence of the Khans in the region, and ashamed of this archaic society, which runs counter to the image of an evolving Iran. Less than a century ago, the nomads represented half the population of Iran. Today, no more than 1.5 million remain to try and resist the many policies promoting forced sedentism and the calls to modernisation.

The invisible mountain people Lifting the veil on the existence of these complex people makes for a journalistic challenge of gargantuan proportions. One wonders about the reality behind the myth. ‘Do they really exist?’ is the question that Catalina Martin-Chico kept asking herself when she began to take an interest in this invisible people, who have ceased to blip on the official radar. ‘I had heard about them a little by chance, yet when I tried to do concrete research, I realised that the last studies about them dated back to the 70s,’ says the 47-year old Franco-Spanish photographer who managed to track them down thanks to chance encounters.