Ferdynand Goetel’s Iranian Experience: A Non-Colonial European Account of Mashhad

Abstract

Ferdynand Goetel was a prisoner-of-war and a Polish refugee from Soviet Russia who, in 1920, spent a few months in Mashhad. The current study is an attempt to present Goetel’s unique view of the city and its inhabitants. Khorasan, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was frequently visited by foreigners who left numerous accounts of both the province and its capital Mashhad. Most of them were written by British and Russian citizens; representitive of the great powers striving to dominate the region through an extensive infrastructure of consulates, military posts, and commercial networks across the country. Goetel made his way to Iran after escaping six years of exile in Russian Turkestan, and he perceived his time in Iran as a liberation from captivity. During the few months he was forced to spend in Mashhad, waiting for evacuation, he explored the city and became acquainted with its inhabitants. His memoirs are not only a testimony of life in Iran at the beginning of the century, written from neither a colonial nor semi-colonial perspective, but also a source of information on the turbulent times of the late-Qajar decline.