Maryam, the “Red Princess” When she was born in May 1914, the streets of Teheran had not been spoiled yet by the smell of petrol-driven cars and buses, but the air was smelling of the blossoming lime- and chestnut trees, and odor that at least in this season was almost strong enough to evercome the usual smell of the horses and donkey. But because she was born in a palace surrounded by a hugh garden and several pools with water-lillies on it, the smells, the dust and the noise of the capital of Persia was kept away behind walls and a broad fence of trees. The palace was only one part of the properties of her family, the dynasty of the Quajars, who ruled the country for more than a hundred years. They were not only the ruling family of Persia and gave birth to the Shah, princess and ministers of the gouvernment, but over many years also managed to accumulate amazing rich property. They not only owned the famous Shahs palace on the nothern outskirt of Tehran but many thousands of land across the country, with summer residences on the Caspian Sea coast and in the Elborz mountains and winter residences at the gulf islands. When she was born to the Quajar prince Abdol-Hossein Mirza Farmanfarma and his wife Batoul Khanoum, she was given the name Princess Maryam Farman Farmaian. Wheras her mother was always around her and the most important person, her father always had others wifes, whom she refered to as aunts. Because of this huge family tree with many crisscrossing branches, she had altogether 24 brothers and 12 daughters. For all of them, one of the eight wifes of Farmanfarma was their mother, and their most beloved and respected person, whereas the prince Farmanfarma came home only occasionally when his many gouvernmental duties as minister or gouverner of Fars, Azerbaidshan or Kerman gave him a few free days. When she was in the first years attending a school that her father had especially founded for the education of girls, some changes happened in the upper ranks of the Persian leadership. A former lieutenant who was in charge of leading the palace guard, Reza Khan became unease with his role as a military servant to the Quajar Shah, and in 1924 he plotted a coup d’etat against her uncle Ahmad Shah Qajar, the last ruler of the Quajar dynasty. Princess Maryam remembered this army lieutenant very well, because he preferred to play with her and all her sisters and brothers in the palace garden. He gave the Shahs children their first lessons on horse riding, he trained them how to shoot with a gun on empty glass bottles and tought them to play his army trumpet. When Reza Khan returned at dusk to his army baracks, her and all her sisters and brothers guided him to the gate and he had tp promise them to continue the games at exactly the same position as they finished. The high walls and dense trees around the palace garden not only protected the live of princess Maryam from all the atrocities of the noisy, dangerous and dirty daily life of the ordinary people, it also shielded her from understanding that the situation in the country had dramatically changed since she was born 6 years ago. But even without the fences around the huge garden and the thick walls of the palace, she would have probably not understand how complicate these changes were. The only difference that she and her play-mates realized was that from one day on their lieutenant master and play companion did not came any more. And suddenly the large family, all her uncles and aunts and servants started to condemn lieutenant Reza Khan, called him a liar, a traitor, an enemy of the right Shah. It appeared that during an increasing political chaotic situation that destabilized the whole country, the lieutenant had overruled the old Quajar Shah, and by this ended the political power of the entire dynasty, inluding this of her own family. From one day to the other in 1925, princess Maryam’s parents lost their exclusive position, and remained nothing else than a large and rich, but privat family. Princess Maryam, meanwhile 10 years old continued to learn at the first Tehran school for girls, where her sense for social rights and equal opportunities and human progress developed. She received a liberal education for the Persian women of her time, and attended university later in life while living in exile. She was a linguist, fluent in Persian, Arabic, French, Russian, German, and English. An independent thinker, she appreciated communist theory. She chose to become a member of the Tudeh party, because this political organisation was the only party willing to accept her as a woman and give her a chance to become active in the women's rights movemen. Maryams enthusiams for political changes and a new society with equal rights for everybody was so strong that she decided to abandon her aristocratic name and adopted the surname Firouz in her political struggles; her grandfather's name. She became known as Maryam Firouz in the political arena. She retained her legal name as Maryam Farman Farmaian with pride. From her first mariages, that was still in the traditional way arranged by her father, she had two daughters. After seperating from her first husband in 1949, Maryam married Noureddin Kianouri, a member and later general secretary of the Tudeh Party of Iran. In cooperation with Kianouri, Farman Farmaian established a women's division of the Tudeh Party. Following the attempted assassination of Mohammad Reza Shah on 4 February 1949, the Tudeh party was blamed and her husband was imputed to have been one of the masterminds of the operation. She and her husband were forced into exile. She started her life in exile in the USSR and then lived in East Berlin, in the former German Democratic Republic. During her years of exile she completed her university studies and later taught French in the universities of Leipzig and Berlin. She remembered the years in Leipzig as a nice time, and she spend every free moment in the large parks of the city, which during most of the year where as green and full of flowers as the garden of her Tehran childhood was only during spring time. Princess Maryam and her husband left Leipzig in 1979 , when the Islamic Revolution chased Shah reza Pahlevi, the son of her childhood companion lieutenant out of the country. Maryam, meanwile entitled the Red Prinzess, tried to refound the peoples party of Iran (Tudeh), but the islamic fundamentalist regime considered this a threat to their political power and imprisoned Maryam and her husband in 1983 accusing them for espionage for the Soviet Union. Maryam Firouz spent all of her imprisonment in solitary confinement. She was the only member of the Tudeh Party's imprisoned leadership who did not make a forced confession on TV at the time. Most of her sisters and brothers from the former mighty Quasar dynasty, with hom she had spend the happy days of childhood in the Tehran palace, had left the country and settled down on the other side of the globe, in Los Angeles. They had managed to rescue most of their wealth and spend a rich and safe, but at the same time lazy and boring time in their new california home. Occasionally, at persian receptions or during Nowrouz, the children and grand children of the Quajar dynasty met some members of another persian family. They knew that they had to do with the coup d’etat in 1924, which was the beginning of their long lasting loss of power, when their grandfather, Ahmad Shah Quajar was overruled by the grandfather of this other emigrant family, Reza Shah, the former palace guard lieutenant who used to overcome the boring time as a guard member by playing with the Shahs kids funny games. While he first only replaced the Shah as a companion for his children, some years later he succesfully reached for all his power and took over the entire country. But now, 60 years later, the descendents of both dynasties with the last remnants of their former endless material wealt that they had managed to rescue into their american exal, where nothing more than “Shahs of Sunset” in a cheap Hollywood soap opera. Maryam Farman Farmaian, a.k.a Maryam Firouz, was released from political prison in 1994 and placed under house arrest for a couple more years, but enjoyed persian cooking and red french and german books that friends send her from far away. She was released to the custody of her eldest daughter in Tehran. She was released from prison in 1994 and placed under house arrest for a couple more years before being released to the custody of her eldest daughter in Tehran. When she died in Tehran on March 23, 2008, newspapers all around the world recognised her political active life and her devotion to womans liberation. .