Summer festival to highlight rural heritage in Gilan

The annual event will be held at Gilan Rural Heritage Museum from August 12 to 23. Devoted to ancestral life, the open-air museum embraces dozens of countryside houses, traditional cafes and restaurants, a mosque, a school, a rustic charcoal-making furnace and a renovated blacksmith workshop.

It also embraces buildings, a conference hall, a handicrafts marketplace, a museum of local dignitaries among other sites. Bounded by the Caspian Sea and the Republic of Azerbaijan on the north, Gilan, in the far past, was within the sphere of influence of the successive Achaemenid, Seleucid, Parthian, and Sassanid empires that ruled Iran until the 7th century CE.

Gilan is divided into a coastal plain including the large delta of Sefid Rud and adjacent parts of the Alborz mountain range. Paddy cultivation dominates the region. Tobacco, fruits, vegetables, and tea (grown in the foothills above the rice fields) are also being cultivated in Gilan.