REMEMBERING THE 1979 IRANIAN REVOLUTION
Enghelab Shod [Farsi for “The Revolution Happened”] is an oral history archive on memories of the 1979 Iranian revolution. This archive attempts to understand this revolution from the perspectives of those who lived through it. As a significant moment in the history of contemporary Iran, we believe that a close and intimate view of the 1979 revolution reveals much about the hopes, the fears and the aspirations of Iranian people in their more than a century-long and ongoing struggle for freedom, independence and equality. Thus, we focus on everyday experiences to understand the human and embodied aspects of life amidst a revolution.
In this archive you will find seven memories, collected and represented through recorded oral history interviews with diasporic Iranians in Canada. Each interview presents the story of the revolution from the perspective of one individual. In these memories, narrators tell us how they learnt that “the revolution happened.” Each memory is accompanied by one or a set of objects or artifacts that are associated with these memories.
This archive has no claim to presenting a final, representative, or cohesive historiography of the Iranian revolution and has no affiliation with any political party. Our aim is simply to create a forum for intergenerational and intercultural communication about what life may look like during grand historical change.
Unless otherwise stated, all photos are either part of the public domain or Creative Commons licensed.