Days of wines and roses in Shiraz

One of our best-known wine varieties gets its name from an ancient Iranian city. Brian Johnston explores the original Shiraz.

As my long-distance coach trundles towards Shiraz over a red-clay desert, it's hard to believe this city was once renowned for vineyards and rose gardens. The highway snakes between barren hills, passing roadside teahouses where fairy lights are rock-strung for want of trees. Cars fart and honk, and shabby one-night hotels promise only dust and depression to itinerant salesmen.

Yet the cracked concrete suburbs conceal Shiraz's soft centre. Soon roses, wanton in the dust, bloom from roadside flowerbeds. Monuments and minarets appear, crumbling but glorious. They catch the pink rays of sun before neon gleams. Lanterns fizz from candied-seed stalls, lighting me from bus station to hotel. Later, I find a restaurant joyous with family conversation, where waiters flit with tureens of saffron rice and spiced lamb.

Shiraz is a friendly, sophisticated city, built on poetry and centuries of trade. Its 1600-metre altitude gives it a soothing climate. Tree-lined streets and parks invite shady wandering. Once, before the mad mullahs took over, it was noted for wine and whimsy.

"The Shirazi are people whose thoughts dwell upon passionate love, and shades of trees. They are people of sleepy eyes and melting moods," wrote English traveller H.M. Stanley in 1895. That description alone is enough to lure me here.

The wine is gone, but Shiraz's fabled roses remain, a tribute to 13th-century poet Saadi, whose greatest work, The Rose Garden, is widely admired in Iran. His marble tomb lies in a rocky valley north-east of town, but I prefer the rival mausoleum of another Shirazi poet, Hafez. Locals linger beneath a green-roofed pavilion, pressing two fingers against Hafez's marble sarcophagus and murmuring lines from poems bawdy with wine, dancing and love. I sit in the teahouse where hookahs grumble, surrounded by splashing pools and pomegranate trees, and marvel at a society as familiar with poetry as Australians are with cricket scores.

Shiraz is a scholarly city that reached its zenith as a centre for literature and arts under the Timurid Dynasty (1380-1502). Iran's frequent earthquakes have been unkind to its architectural legacy, and most of its historic buildings date from the time of Karim Khan, first ruler of the Zand Dynasty (1747-1779), who made Shiraz his capital and patronised the arts.

Next morning, I head to Karim Khan's striking four-tower citadel, the centrepiece of Shiraz. It houses municipal offices, though for a small fee I wander into its courtyard and sit under lemon trees. In the late afternoon, locals perambulate around the citadel's perimeter, slurping lurid ice-creams and cracking nuts. It's easy to strike up conversations: Iranians are invariably friendly, with an old-fashioned sense of decorum and polite conversation.