About Caroline
Caroline Mawer is a Persian-speaking (though British) historian, photographer and adventurer. Her longstanding interest in Persian culture started over thirty years ago, on a family trip to the legendary cities of Samarkand and Bukhara.
Caroline was originally a medical doctor, working in the Russian tuberculosis prisons and on nuclear decontamination in Siberia, then in Montserrat on public health as the volcano there continued to erupt. She still now works part-time as a doctor in the culturally diverse area of north-east London.
She became interested in the Bakhtiari tribe after seeing one of their very special carpets and being told about the traditional twice-yearly migration (kuch). She then learnt Persian (and a little Luri) to be able to walk kuch with an ordinary Bakhtiari family. Of course, the Bakhtiari are much more than simple nomads – Middle East oil was first found on their land, and they were a key part of the 1909 Constitutional Revolution. To underline this, in 2008 she collated an exhibition of rare early images of the tribe at the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS), and is now hoping to be able to publish these in a fully illustrated book.
Travelling in time, as well as across Iran, Caroline is the first person to ever retrace – on the ground in Iran – Shah Abbas’ 1601 thousand-kilometre walk from Isfahan to Mashhad. She has finished an MA with a special focus on Safavid history at SOAS, and is currently completing a book-length tale of her quest to follow in the Great Shah’s footsteps.
If you want to hear more about Iranian history and culture, please sign up to Caroline’s weekly newsletter here or by simply emailing caroline@carolinemawer.com with 'newsletter signup' in the title line. Every Friday you’ll then receive a little gem from her most recent work.