The archive keeps running into the same three backgrounds: a harbour with grey water and cargo frames, a brick vaulted corridor, and geometric tilework in a courtyard. They are not decoration in a memory. They are geography.
Why they narrow a search
- The Caspian pier puts you within a handful of ports — Anzali above all, because that is where children’s homes were located near the working docks.
- The brick vaults are bazaar architecture, and the vaulted type is densest in Tabriz and Rasht.
- Courtyard tilework with a central pool narrows to a mosque or a shrine complex, which a home often used for deliveries and paperwork.
Kian indexes every document that arrives, anonymised and cross-referenced, precisely so a remembered ceiling can be matched to a building on a 1987 municipal list. Niloufar, who is looking for the family that named her in Shiraz, is the other half of that work: the memory someone is willing to describe out loud.
If a fragment of a lullaby, a photo of a vault or the shape of a courtyard is all you have, write it down in your profile in plain language. The archive is built out of those.