Child in the Makhunik village | Makhunik, Iran, 2017
May 2018 · 2 min read
I went by hitchhiking to the little Makhunik village close to the Afghan border after hearing its story from one guy in Mashhad. It was told that in village are living very short people. After I got there I recognized that in reality local people are couple centimetres below average (I'm 173 which is not too much for European realities) but for sure they aren't extreme short. Historically they had even 120-140cm, now it's more, we can say, touristic thing. It's far from famous Esfehan or Shiraz, it's South Khorosan Ostan (province) so "westerners" generally don't get there too often. It's very close to Sistan-o-Balochistan province considered as unsafe. Every year to Makhunik get just couple tourists, mostly Iranian.
After some conversations I noticed this village it's not interesting because of "height", it's interesting because of very strong Sunni faith among inhabitants which, what is making it even more interesting, are Persian (Persians in Iran are mostly Shia, Sunnis are mostly Kurds, Turkmens and Balochi). I'm reminding Iran is predominantly Shia country. One of them was studying in Damascus Quranic/Islamic School (before Civil War broke up). They said much more which show it's not ordinary village (also related to Syrian Civil War and conflicts between salafi fractions fe. Nusra - ISIS). It was very visible there have to be present some radical elements.
Anyway it was great experience and amazing chance to exercise my Farsi language in difficult religious based conversations.
I wasn't surprised that after leaving it Iranian Police decide to interrogate me.
