This page keeps the memory of 31 people whose names are linked with Kashan, in the province of Isfahan. All of these 31 people were executed; no other fate is recorded in the list for Kashan. The first date on this page is 3 Azar 1393 and the last 7 Ordibehesht 1405. In these twelve years, Kashan Prison has many times been the place where a sentence was carried out whose news, if it got out at all, arrived with only a name and a date.
From one name a year to eighteen names
The names from Kashan in the first years can be counted on one hand: one name in 1393 and one name in 1398. Then 2 names in 1401, 4 names in 1402 and 2 names in 1403. But in the year 1404, 18 people on this page were executed; more than half of all the names in a single year. And the year 1405, which has not yet ended, has 3 names so far.
Two days on this list have two executions each: 17 Aban 1402 and 7 Ordibehesht 1405, which is the last date on this page. The days 3 Azar 1393, 30 Tir 1398 and 11 Khordad 1402 have one name each; the first of them was executed years apart from the next.
Who they were
The recorded ages range from 26 to 40 years, and the median is 32 years. That is, those executed in Kashan, as far as we know their age, were all in the years of youth and early middle age; in the years in which most people work and have built a family or are about to build one. The sources have clearly written of 4 of these 31 people that they were women. No one under 18 is recorded on this page.
A page without stories
For none of these 31 people have the sources we have recorded a description of life. No occupation, no child's name, no sentence from a relative. We do not know who those four women were, where their children are now, or who received their bodies. We do not know how the eighteen people who were hanged in the year 1404 spent their last days, and we do not know whether the two people who were executed together on 7 Ordibehesht 1405 knew each other or were only placed side by side at the last dawn.
This emptiness itself says something. The executions in Kashan, as this list shows, took place without a sound, and the news of them, if it arrived, was only a few words. Behind each of these 31 rows there was someone who had a home, someone who loved them, and a day on which they did not come back. The charge attributed to each of them is the account of the authorities, and this page does not regard it as a verdict of their guilt.
Sources and the incompleteness of the list
These 31 names are not all of those who were executed in Kashan. The real number is higher, and many executions were either reported without names or never reported; Kashan appears in our list only with names that a source has recorded. The sources of this page are only three: HRANA with 22 cases, the Iran Human Rights Society with 18 cases and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center with 2 cases. Most entries rest on one or two reports and may contain errors in the spelling of a name, an age or a date.
If you knew one of these 31 people, if you were a relative, neighbour or fellow prisoner of one of them, we ask you to send us whatever you know: a memory, a photo or a correction. The page for Kashan, which does not yet have even one story, needs above all the voices of those who knew these 31 people and can say who they were.