> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.iranglobalaffairs.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Iran My Great-Grandfather Built - URL: https://www.iranglobalaffairs.org/the-iran-my-great-grandfather-built/ - Published: 2026-11-01T19:38:17.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-01T19:38:17.000Z - Description: An old company book leads Noor Afshar to reconsider the Iran her great-grandfather helped build. Tracing GAMMA’s history across the 1979 Revolution, she reflects on industrial achievement, family memory, and what survives political rupture. - Author: Babak Rezaee - Tags: #author-noor-afshar, History, Art, & Culture, Essay, Industrial Development, Historical Memory, 1979 Revolution My great-grandfather is sitting behind a desk in Tehran. There is a pen in front of him and a shelf of books behind him. He looks directly at the camera, as though whoever took the photograph has interrupted him in the middle of a working day. Above his picture, the page reads: “A Word from the Chairman.” It is part of an old book about GAMMA, the Iranian engineering and construction company he led. My family kept the book after leaving Iran. I had seen his photograph many times before I thought to read what came after it. For a long time, I loved the page simply because it showed him. Only recently did I begin to wonder about the people and places in the rest of the book. “Since its inception, over twenty-five years ago,” my great-grandfather writes, “GAMMA has come a long way, developing from a modest beginning to one of Iran’s major contractors.” Near the end of his message, he looks forward to an “even more promising future.” I used to pause at those words. He could not have known what would happen in 1979\. I could. That knowledge made his confidence in the future feel almost painful to read. But I had made an assumption without realizing it. I thought the end of the world around his company must also have meant the end of the company itself. GAMMA is still there. Once I learned that, I opened the book again. This time I paid attention to the pages I had passed over before: the company history, the lists of projects, and the photographs of machinery and construction sites. I began to see more clearly why my great-grandfather was so proud of what they had built. According to the company book, GAMMA began work in 1953, initially concentrating on structural steel and the installation of industrial equipment. It was formally registered in 1956\. Over time, it expanded into civil, mechanical, and building construction. The book describes divisions that developed into subsidiary companies and a firm increasingly capable of taking on complex industrial projects. Then come the numbers. GAMMA’s own records list more than 400 kilometers of roads built in different parts of Iran, 94 microwave stations along domestic oil supply lines, more than 400 housing units, and approximately 200,000 square meters of commercial and industrial buildings. These are the company’s own figures, and there are still important things I do not know. I do not know the size of its workforce at its height, for example, or the value of its contracts. But the figures help give meaning to my great-grandfather’s claim that GAMMA had grown from modest beginnings into a major contractor. The photographs make that growth more tangible. There is a carbon black plant in Ahvaz, a plasticizer plant at Bandar Shahpour, and a refinery and soda ash plant in Shiraz. Some images are filled with pipes and towers whose technical purposes I cannot identify. Others show buildings standing in wide, almost empty landscapes. I find myself looking beyond the structures themselves and imagining what it took to bring materials and people to those sites, then turn a plan into something that worked. > The Shah’s government had the resources and ambition to pursue industrial development on a vast scale. Companies such as GAMMA helped make those plans real. One page has stayed with me in particular. At the top, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi signs a register at the inauguration of the Shiraz soda ash plant. Beneath the photograph is a letter dated June 5, 1974, from the National Petrochemical Company to GAMMA’s managing director, thanking members of the company who had worked on the plant. The photograph captures the moment a project was formally celebrated. The letter makes me think instead about all the days before that moment: the engineers drawing and checking their plans, the people installing equipment, and the workers arriving each morning while the plant was still unfinished. The Shah’s government had the resources and ambition to pursue industrial development on a vast scale. Companies such as GAMMA helped make those plans real. Both parts of that history matter to me. I do not want to take agency away from the people who carried out that work, but neither do I want to imagine that they built outside the political and economic system in which that development took place. At the same time, I do not want the company book to become a source of uncomplicated nostalgia. My great-grandfather’s message praises the Shah, and the book itself was produced to celebrate GAMMA’s achievements. It was not written to document every experience of the people who worked for the company, nor every dimension of the political and economic order in which they lived. Iran’s rapid development took place alongside political repression and economic strains. People could be proud of what they were building while also wanting a different political future for their country. That is part of what makes the archive so interesting to me now. Its pages record genuine achievements, but they do not tell the whole story. They make me want to know more, not only about my great-grandfather, but about the many people whose names do not appear in the chairman’s message. For much of my life, I thought of 1979 as a line dividing one Iran from another. My family’s photographs seemed to belong entirely on the far side of it. I looked at them with love, but also with the sense that almost everything contained in them had disappeared. GAMMA has made that division look less complete. Public records from Iran’s construction industry describe a company that continued operating for decades after the Revolution. Its later projects include work connected to South Pars and the Jask oil terminal. The company my great-grandfather wrote about continued building in an Iran he could not have imagined when he wrote of its “even more promising future.” But here the archive also reaches its limits. I still do not know exactly how GAMMA crossed 1979\. I do not yet know whether my family’s ownership changed after the Revolution, whether or how its management changed, how many employees remained, or what allowed the company to continue operating. The survival of the GAMMA name does not prove that everything inside the company remained the same. Those unanswered questions matter. In fact, they are part of what I now want to understand. > A revolution can overthrow a government and transform an economy. It cannot make a country begin again from nothing. What GAMMA’s continued existence does show is something more modest but still important: political rupture does not erase everything that came before it. A revolution can overthrow a government and transform an economy. It cannot make a country begin again from nothing. Iran after 1979 inherited roads and factories, but also people who knew how to build, repair, and operate them. Some plans ended. Others changed. And some people went back to work the next morning in a country that was still theirs. That realization has changed how I think about the Iran my great-grandfather inhabited. As a student of international politics, I often encounter Iran through the vocabulary of geopolitics: sanctions, nuclear negotiations, military threats, diplomacy, and regime survival. I study those questions too, and they matter. But I do not want them to become the only vocabulary through which I understand the country. My great-grandfather’s book reminds me that Iran is also made by people who go to work, solve practical problems, make plans, care for one another, and try to leave something useful behind. The people at GAMMA did not know that historians would one day call the country around them “pre-revolutionary Iran.” They were simply living in their present. The plant in Shiraz had to be finished. The road had to reach somewhere. Tomorrow still belonged to them. For years, I thought my great-grandfather’s hope for an “even more promising future” was sad because history had proved him wrong. Now I am less sure. Perhaps he meant another project for GAMMA, another year of work, another opportunity for the people around him to build something they believed would last. Some of it did last. GAMMA did. Iran did. I cannot know exactly what future my great-grandfather imagined from his desk in Tehran. I cannot inherit his city exactly as he knew it, and I do not want to romanticize it simply because it is beyond my reach. What I can do is look more closely at what he and others made there. I can keep asking what happened to the people who built it, what survived the political order in which it was created, and what changed. And I can retain something of the confidence expressed in that old company book: that Iran has a life larger than any single political moment, and that its future is still something its people have a part in making. He was looking ahead. All these years later, so am I.