The fading face of a vanishing legacy: the life and death of immigrant culture in Anzali port city

Considering that cultural geography traces the cultural flows and explores the relation of culture to place, for us, as urban researchers and the grandchildren of immigrant families, inquiring how Anzali port city in northern Iran evolved into a ‘pseudo-European’ city and then fell into decline was a concern. We had the privilege to be quite familiar with immigrant communities, cultural behaviors, and everyday customs in Anzali and seemingly were the last generation with this knowledge, as today, the ‘extinction’ of all those people has left only a shadow of what once was a lively community. Studying the city’s actual deteriorating state, we became persuaded to make a small remark on Anzali’s vanishing cultural legacy, mixing our family’s history with historical and pictorial documents. The following text is a shortcut to what at least four generations of immigrants have lived and how they practiced their culture in a welcoming land, ending with an epilogue on a present picture of the fading face of immigrants’ cultural legacy.