Images from the Endgame: Persia through a Russian Lens 1901–1914

On 11 August 1913, the Tsar’s consul in Persia, Alexander Iyas, photographed the head of the Kurdish Piran tribe in front of a group of fierce-looking warriors from Baiz-Pasha’s Mangur tribe. He was thus marking a reconciliation he had successfully negotiated between the two. Fifteen months later, Iyas was beheaded by some of these same men and, by an extraordinary series of coincidences, the negatives of these images were recovered on a Turkish officer killed by the Russians during a World War battle near Tabriz in January 1915.Alexander Iyas, officer in the Tsar’s Lithuanian Regiment, had arrived in Persia in 1901 in the small town of Turbat-i Haydari near the Afghan border. He was armed with several cameras, including the remarkable No4 Panoram...