The mountain over the city
Alvand is a long granite massif in the Zagros, about 50 km from end to end, rising to 3,580 m just south of Hamedan. Its snows feed the springs and streams on which the city and its farms depend, and from almost any street in Hamedan you can see the mountain at the end of it.
It is a meeting place of cultures too. The range forms a language border between Persian, Kurdish, Luri and Turkish, and its high pastures are the traditional summer grazing lands of nomadic tribes.
Royal inscriptions
Lower down, at the foot of the mountain, Darius the Great and his son Xerxes had inscriptions carved into the granite, in Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian: the Ganjnameh, one of the best-known monuments of the Achaemenid period.
Trees, thorns and springs
Oak woodland once covered parts of the slopes, and small patches remain in the valleys. Higher up, the ground is open grass, thicker around springs and streams. The thorny gavar shrub, which yields tragacanth gum used in medicine and industry, grows in the valleys.
