Chapter 23: EVIN – SECTION 209
Evin Prison is built in the foothills of Alborz, beneath the snow-capped mountains that tower above the city of Tehran. It was constructed in such a way that only a wall and its main entrance are visible from the outside. The myriad wards that comprise this notorious penitentiary are hidden behind and beneath the natural slope of the hills, buried in tunnels that stretch far underground. But none of this is evident at first sight.
After passing through the large iron entrance gate, you see a beautiful green space, filled with flowers and lush grasses, plants and fountains, with mighty trees stretching up to the sky. You are momentarily dazzled by skylarks leaping into the blue overhead; you are thrilled by the cooing of the doves among the leaves, and your first thought is Is this a prison orparadise? In fact, the main compound is entirely separate from the rest of the prison complex. This is just the administrative part of Evin, its green showcase.
To arrive at the prison itself, you have to turn north and take a steep walk up the hillside in the direction of the Alborz mountains. This path leads to the iron gates of the guards’ headquarters next to the principal clinic of the prison, emblazoned with the sign: The Forty-Eight Bed Hospital of Shahíd Lájivardí.
If you turn left at the clinic and take another short walk, you will enter a second compound – Section 4, the ward for male political prisoners held under the tightest security. There is a car park in this second compound, reserved for the exclusive use of the Intelligence officers who come here to conduct their interrogations. The prison bakery is also here, so there is always the incongruous fragrance of freshly baked lavásh bread floating in the air, which, despite being machine-made, is deliciously seductive. To the right and directly across from the bakery entrance, with its deceptively tempting smells, is a small iron door painted a nondescript beige colour that leads straight into Section 209.
Step through that door and you’re in the heart of hell. It is as simple as that.
Section 209 contains a maze of small and large, solitary and shared confinement cells, as well as interrogation and torture rooms, along a series of connected, parallel passages. It consists of two floors above ground, with several windows overlooking the car park, and one or possibly more basement floors below. Since I was always blindfolded in these lower areas, I cannot vouch for their number. But at ground level, you see only storage rooms and administrative offices. The inspection, security and control rooms are there, too, to welcome you, to identify you, to register you, to fingerprint you, and of course, to body search you. At the far end of this ground floor corridor, you will find a staircase on the left.
Seven steps up and you turn; another seven steps up and you are on the first floor. There, at the top of the stairs, you will see the wide hallway of the Isolation Ward stretching before you. It is known as the Main Corridor, and it is effectively at right angles to – and twice as long as – the ground floor corridor, below. On the right-hand side of the Main Corridor, doors branch off into narrow passageways that lead to the solitary and shared confinement cells of the Isolation Ward. On the left are the interrogation rooms, several of which have been padded with acoustic insulation and are known by colour, as the White Room, Blue Room or Green Room. A small health centre and a few offices are also located here.
The passageways branching off to the right along the length of the Main Corridor are identified by number and known as Passage 100, Passage 200, Passage 300. The first of these leads into the women’s sector of the Isolation Ward, with a green oil cloth curtain hanging in front of the door and a button that you press to be allowed entry. The bell of the Isolation Ward is guaranteed to jangle the nerves. Its harsh, piercing buzz cuts painfully through the smothering silence.
On entering what is known as “Band-i-Sad” or Passage 100 of Section 209, you see a row of doors along the wall to your left, which open onto a small patio, the toilet and shower room, a little storage room and all the confinement cells.
The women’s sector in the Isolation Ward originally consisted of this one corridor only, with ten tiny solitary confinement cells along it numbered in the 100s. But in the year 2005 (1384), when many members of the Bahá’í community were imprisoned here, four of the interior walls between the cells were demolished, and their number was reduced from ten to five, allowing for larger, shared cells instead. The wall at the far end was also broken down to create an opening between Passage 100 and Passage 200, previously used for male prisoners. When female detainees were few, a large metal locker was pulled over to block this opening, but when they increased in number, the locker was pushed away, and the two parallel passages were connected. This was how the confinement cells with numbers in the 200s were absorbed into the women’s sector of the Isolation Ward. Sometime later, the women’s sector spawned Passage 300 as well. Evin is fertile.
The first thing you see in Passage 100 of the women’s Isolation Ward is a small iron door to your right that leads down a set of steep steps to the large fresh-air yard at ground level. Here, in a courtyard which, according to my step size, is about twenty-three steps wide by twenty-seven steps long, prisoners are permitted to exercise for about twenty minutes, two or three times a week. The surrounding walls are some six metres high and a wide-range CCTV camera on a five-metre pole has been fixed against a wall to the left of the entrance. Since the cells, especially the solitary ones, are very small, prisoners are often in desperate need of this yard for brisk walking and running, as well as for fresh air.
On the other side of Passage 100, opposite the door leading down to this yard, is another door leading into a small enclosure, or the little fresh-air yard. It is more like a patio than a yard, and despite its name, has something of a domestic air about it, with its washing lines overhead and its indoor plants and flowerpots standing here and there; it is used for drying laundry rather than exercise and is furnished with a tap, a blue rubber hose and two large black plastic bins against the wall. The floor is paved with old tiles, and the roof is glassed in, with a few panes removed for ventilation purposes. Next to this patio is the white-tiled toilet and shower room of Passage 100, whose single window opens onto it. The toilet is an oriental one and combined with the shower, so there is always a strong odour of drains in the patio and the passage. There is also a small storage room, situated between the toilet and shower patio, and another row of five confinement cells.
Each of the passages of the Isolation Ward for women has four shared confinement cells and one small “punishment” or solitary cell. The larger cells, created from two smaller ones, have two doors each, only one of which is in use, but there are peepholes in both. There are also two rectangular windows facing the flat rooftop above both doors; some are covered with wire mesh, and others with a perforated metal sheet, which darkens the place depressingly. The small steel sink in each cell is often rusty, and the Western-style steel toilets in the “punishment” or solitary cells at the end of each passage are dysfunctional.
There is a small niche, the size of a shoe box, in the middle of the ceiling of these cells, in which a low-consumption bulb shines day and night. The light is not bright enough to read by but neither does it allow for complete darkness when prisoners want to sleep. There is plenty of light outside the cell, however. Four tall windows flank the right-hand side of Passage 100, between one door leading to the fresh-air yard below and another to the guards’ residential area. These fill the corridor with light and offer a thrilling view of the exercise yard below – if you are lucky enough to snatch a clandestine glance at it.
The distribution of cells is similar in all the passages, the only difference being that the toilet and shower are situated at the far end of Passage 200 and at the beginning of Passage 100. The two small solitary or “punishment” cells of 215 and 115 are therefore liberally perfumed by malodorous drains; they are also noisier and darker than the other cells, because of the relentless rattle and throb of air-conditioning units on the roof of the guards’ quarters, which block the light from the perforated windows above the doors.
There are two card-operated telephones on the left- and right-hand walls of the stairwell leading down into the large fresh-air yard. Prisoners were allowed to use these during my time in Section 209, to call certain pre-approved numbers only. There were also some telephones in a room beyond the offices on the Main Corridor, as well as in a small alcove filled with bookshelves, where the Corridor reaches an apparent dead end.
Except there is never an end to Evin. Or you may be dead before you reach it. At least one of the bookshelves in that alcove can be moved aside to reveal yet another doorway leading into yet another passage, filled with yet more cells and torture chambers…
They say that no one actually knows how many cells and wards and passageways there are in the notorious Section 209 of Evin. It seems to exist in another dimension.
*
Section 209 was originally created for the use of SAVAK, the late Shah’s secret police but is now under the control of the Ministry of Intelligence of the Islamic Republic. The conditions here range from the miserable to the abominable. This is where all political prisoners and prisoners of conscience are incarcerated, where a would-be anarchist, a human rights lawyer, or a girl daring to teach literacy classes are treated with equal ruthlessness, and where anyone considered a danger to the state, a threat to the regime, a risk to the stability of the government, can be interrogated, beaten, tortured and often killed, unseen.
Section 209 consists of the Public as well as the Isolation Wards, accommodating men as well as women. The pale green and off-white cell walls are etched with words of pain and longing; the narrow windows above the doors are constructed to shut out light; the floors covered by cheap beige carpeting have been trodden thin by oppression, and the atmosphere of the place is heavy in all seasons, with heat and grief, with cold and hopelessness. This is where you suffocate from want of air and are crippled by lack of space. This is where you stop eating, stop wearing your own clothes, and sometimes lose your mind.
Section 209 is where the interrogator’s dominance and the prisoner’s subservience are absolute, where violent torturers, petty guards, and haughty officials have unconditional license over the weak, the vulnerable, and the fragile – not to mention the innocent. It is a place of persecution, of forced and fake confessions, of physical and mental torture, of tricks and lies by men who, after eating a full breakfast with their families, park their cars below those windows and walk through the doors, inhaling the fragrant odours of baked bread every morning, to inflict harm on their fellow human beings until nightfall.
Section 209 is the place of paradox, where opposites live cheek by jowl: courage and cowardice, sudden screams and fathomless silence. The guards mouth their messages in here and skulk about soundlessly in plastic shoes; the entire place is suffused in a fog of stillness. But it is also the place of piercing shrieks, cries of despair and sudden shouts for help. This is a place to die or grow spiritually strong, where doubt and belief, detachment and greed are interwoven. It is a place where you can rise and fall, lose and find yourself, and where you would give up everything in the world for a little taste of steadfastness under your tongue.
Section 209 is where you reach towards your God and withdraw from all others. It is where the basest kind of behaviour serves to test the gold or alloy of your soul. It is where you learn how to sustain blows, face humiliations, defy the breaking of your will, with neither passivity nor aggression, as neither victim nor blamer. Here is where you learn to withstand duplicity and deception and suspicion and paranoia with quiet resilience and a calm trust in the truth. Section 209 is a place of transformation.
This place is a prison within the prison of Evin, a hell within a hell reflecting the worst of human nature. But it can also give you a glimpse of certitude, bring you face-to-face with the beauty and dignity of the human spirit and set you free.
From OPEN WIDE THE DOORS: A Memoir of Faith, Hope, and Freedom in Iran by Mahvash Sabet, pages 250-257; Copyright © 2026 (Oneworld Publications, Ltd., London, UK), Translation copyright © 2026 by A. Mottahedeh and B. Nakhjavani