Ahvaz bridges the Karun—and still answers to oil
Capital of Iran’s Khuzestan province, Ahvaz sits on the Karun near Iraq with more than 1.3 million people in its metro area. Persians, Arabs, Qashqai, Kurds and others share the city. Locals boast of bridges spanning Iran’s largest river by volume, while twentieth-century maps branded it the nation’s oil capital.
Positioned near the Iraqi border and within reach of the Persian Gulf, the city works as an industrial and transport hub. Its residents speak Persian, Khuzestani Arabic, Southern Kurdish and Neo-Mandaic, along with Bakhtiari, Dezfuli and Shushtari dialects, and census figures show steady growth. The Karun, Iran's biggest river by volume, runs through the centre and is one of only two navigable rivers in the country, the other being the Arvand Rud.
Its roots reach the Achaemenid era, when a settlement called Taryana stood where the Royal Road from Persepolis to Sardis crossed the Karun. The Sasanian founder Ardashir I enlarged it on both banks as Hormazd-Ardeshir, later shortened to Darawashir, and built a dam across the river; sources disagree on whether the rename came from him around 230 or from his grandson Hormizd I. The town became capital of Susiana, today's Khuzestan, and in ancient times was a main centre of the Academy of Gondishapur.
The east bank held the market of Huzestan, the commercial heart, while the west bank, called Horamshir, housed administrators and aristocrats. When Muslim armies defeated the Sasanians in the seventh century, Horamshir was destroyed, and the Arabs rendered the surviving market's name as Suq al-Ahvaz.
Historians including Clifford Bosworth and Vladimir Minorsky trace both Ahvaz and Khuzestan to the Uxii, a warrior people recorded as Uvaja in Old Persian and Huzi in Assyrian cuneiform; Syriac Christians called the city Beth Huzaye. Its many Karun bridges earned it the title City of Bridges, but since the early twentieth century it has been better known as Iran's oil capital.
Source: Ahvaz
