Oranges and Persians

Those few of us who spend our working lives in the Roman Empire find current events depressingly familiar. The superpowers of Late Antiquity, Rome and Persia, spent much of the half-millennium before the rise of Islam at war. The Persian Empire incorporated not only modern Iran, but also Iraq. The cockpit of imperial confrontation was precisely where modern Turkey, Iraq, and Syria come together.

The Persians were generally the aggressors. During the invasion of 359 AD, a Roman staff officer was taken by a friendly highland chieftain into the foothills of the Kurdish Alps to look down into the Mesopotamian plain. This is one of the great vistas of the world. Through the heat haze, you can sense the curvature of the earth as you look out from the escarpment across the plain below (even if you have drunk nothing stronger than Turkish beer—a refreshing beverage called Efes Pilsen). The staff officer counted the Persian troops, their knights, their archers, their siege engines, and other weapons of mass destruction as they crossed the Great Zab River. The traverse took over three days.

Romans never enjoyed any success following the Persian invasion route in reverse, i.e. south through modern Iraq along the valley of the Tigris. Once or twice they invaded successfully down the Euphrates (a route which cuts off a substantial corner of what is now Syria) and were able to besiege and burn the Persian capital, near where Baghdad is now. But such expeditions often ended in tears or worse; one emperor died from a thunderbolt during a desert storm.

Despite being the aggressors, the Persians seem more sympathetic than the stuffy Romans. Persian courtiers hunted and played chess, which they called euphonically chatrang. Their silver drinking vessels display reliefs of dancing girls with bellies beautiful to behold. The genial king Khusro II liked to have his financial statements submitted on sheets scented with rosewater. Wine was certainly one of the pleasures of his court, as it was of the Persian poets who told stories about him and his wife Shirin (“Sweety”) well into the Islamic period. What the wine was like is anybody’s guess. Attempts to associate ancient or medieval Persia with the excellent modern grape called Shiraz seem pretty tenuous.

The drink I associate with Persia is, oddly enough, Cointreau. It’s purely a matter of atmosphere. Cointreau is an after-dinner drink made out of oranges, and the orange is not recorded in Persia until later. Cointreau is distilled at Angers, in northwest France, from fruit grown in the West Indies, Brazil, and Spain. In its early days, in the mid-19th century, it had rather anti-clerical, rationalist overtones, in contrast to the sticky liquids made by monks—Benedictine, Chartreuse, and the elixir of Père Gaucher.

But for me Cointreau means Persia. Thirty years ago, I was over there sorting pottery shards for an archaeologist. I came to drink rather a lot of it, courtesy of a friend who was house-sitting in North Teheran for a British diplomat with (thanks to the diplomatic bag) a well-stocked drinks cupboard. Foreign alcohol was available but was fiercely expensive; polite people in the suburbs seemed caught up in a dust-devil of conspicuous consumption. Western goods, such as good drink, were conspicuously consumed (it all came crashing down when the Shah fell). Anyway, my friend knew she could afford to replace only one bottle. So it was the Cointreau we polished off, looking out over the fruit tree blossoms, the melting snow from the mountain behind us pouring audibly down the nearby streams.

The liqueur is clearer than a trout stream, sweet but not oppressive, a relief from the rosewater omnipresent in Persian sweetmeats. The oranges, in fact, make Cointreau somewhat astringent, like the coarser cuts of Tiptree marmalade (manufactured, of course, from bitter Seville oranges and not the watery things which go into inferior brands). One senses springtime and contentment, but not at the expense of rationality (and at the expense hereabouts of only about $10 for a little “pony” bottle), the Merry Monarch might have approved. I don’t know if the diplomat did, or if he ever knew. But then such folk are sent to lie abroad for their country.