Persia Remembered
A poster, a letter, and the dream that started it
I am an Iranian living in conscious exile in the Netherlands.
I cannot return to the country I was born into. But I have found another way to send something back and forward into the world.
This project began with a dream. A strange, vivid one.
In it, I was walking through quiet bookshops. And in every one of them, I saw a map of Iran on the wall but not a map of borders or provinces. It was mythic, symbolic. There were fire temples and ancient rivers. Goddesses. Poetry. Mountains that whispered. There was no regime. No war. Just memory.
What struck me was how people responded to it.
They didn’t turn away. They didn’t argue.
They just looked. Silently. As if something had returned to them they didn’t realize had been missing.
When I woke up, I knew:
This map does not exist in the world.
So I created it.
What This Is
Persia Remembered is a symbolic poster, not a campaign, not a slogan, not an act of protest.
It’s an attempt to reintroduce the soul of Iran into public and private spaces.
To remind people, both Iranians and non-Iranians, that Iran is not just its present.
It is Persia.
It is 5,000 years of civilization, beauty, and depth.
It is gardens, goddesses, sacred fires.
It is poetry before paper. It is endurance through erasure.
What You’re Seeing
The image below is the poster.
It is meant to hang in bookstores, cafés, libraries, therapists’ offices, homes, anywhere that still makes room for silence and meaning.
Each poster is paired with a printed letter, written not in protest, but in memory.
If you'd like to read that letter, you can find it here.
If you’d like to print or share the poster yourself, you can download it here:
Why This Matters
If the West remembered Persia,
perhaps it wouldn’t be so easy to dehumanize Iran.
Perhaps the silence around violence would feel heavier.
Perhaps something in the mind would hesitate, not out of guilt, but out of recognition.
And if Iranians remembered Persia,
perhaps we wouldn’t feel quite so lost.
An Invitation
There is no campaign to join. No mailing list to sign.
This is a small act of cultural remembrance.
A map. A letter. A whisper from the past.
If this image stirs something in you,
I invite you to print it, hang it, pass it on.
Or simply remember.
With care and memory.
Done! Wall adorned. Tribute set. Your reach no longer lives in the echoing halls of digitalization.
Dear friend, what a beautiful piece you have written. Powerful in its simplicity. We reach across borders so easily (you from Iran Persia the Netherlands, I from Canada a Swedish immigrant) because borders are not a reality. They are manmade constructions, made to separate us from one another. Once you have realized One-ness Separation is seen as an illusion.