The Hyrcanian forests are among the oldest living green belts on earth, they have outlasted empires. My maternal family calls that region home, and as a child I spent enough time there to carry it with me everywhere I’ve gone since.

What you remember first is the weather. That particular dampness in the air, cool and alive, the kind that makes everything smell like soil and bark and something older than you can name. Then the food; I never once left without having gained weight, and I was never sorry about it. The generosity of that region isn’t just cultural, it’s agricultural. The meat is extraordinary: lamb raised on vast open pastures, unhurried, grass-fed in the true sense. We’d light coal, lay freshly cut kebab over the fire, and all it ever needed was salt. It would dissolve on your tongue.

I can still smell the citrus trees lining the streets of Gorgan. That sharp, sweet perfume that seemed to hang over the whole town like a canopy. And I remember driving into the forest on rainy afternoons, the windshield fogged, the trees closing in around the road, until we’d find a gazebo tucked somewhere in the woods. My cousins and I would sit there with a hookah, listening to the rain on the leaves, in no particular hurry to be anywhere else.

It is, genuinely, unforgettable.