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Iran is one of the twenty largest countries in the world and its provinces are unusually hard to place for one reason: the country is a ring. A high plateau sits in the middle, mountains wall it in on the north, west and south, and the cities that matter are strung around the rim and along the old caravan roads between them. A province is rarely the place you have heard of. This page is the 31 that exist, the groups worth learning them in, and the traps that come with a map this size.
Iran is divided into 31 provinces, called ostans. Each is run by a governor general appointed by the interior ministry, and each is named, with one or two exceptions, after its capital city or the region around it. They sit above the counties (shahrestans), which are the tier most Iranian addresses and plate codes work at, and the counties sit above districts and rural districts.
The newest of the 31 is Alborz, split off from Tehran province in 2010 around the city of Karaj. Before that the country had 30, and a good deal of older material, including some atlases and datasets, still draws Alborz as part of Tehran. Before 2004, Khorasan was a single province covering the whole of the north-east; it was divided into three, and those three are now North Khorasan, Razavi Khorasan (named for the shrine at Mashhad) and South Khorasan. If a map shows one Khorasan, it is older than this one.
Two kinds of name. Most provinces are named for a city: Tehran, Qom, Yazd, Kerman, Hamadan. The rest are names of regions or peoples that are older than the city: Khuzestan, Lorestan, Kurdistan, Gilan, Mazandaran, Fars, which gave its name to the Persian language. The second kind is easier to place by sound, since they say who lives there.
The traps are the size mismatches. Alborz and Qom are tiny and sit next to Tehran, which is itself small by Iranian standards, while Kerman and Sistan and Baluchestan are among the largest and together fill most of the south-east.
Those six groups are this site's, not Iran's. The country publishes a grouping of its provinces into planning regions, but they are administrative conveniences that nobody names a province by. The six here are cut for drilling: each is a contiguous piece of the country somebody could point at, and each can be switched on and off on its own in the game's start dialog.
North-west is the two Azerbaijans, Ardabil, Zanjan and Kurdistan. Caspian is the wet north, from Gilan east to Golestan, with Qazvin and Alborz behind the mountains. Centre is the capital and the plateau cities around it. West is the Zagros, down to the Khuzestan plain. East is the three Khorasans with Semnan and Yazd. South is the Gulf coast and the south-eastern desert.
Khuzestan: the flat, hot plain at the head of the Persian Gulf, with Ahvaz as its capital and the Karun, Iran's largest river, running through it. It is the only part of the Mesopotamian lowland inside Iran, and it looks like Iraq, not like the mountains that surround it on three sides. Most of the country's oil is under it.
Hormozgan: a long, narrow strip along the Strait of Hormuz, with Bandar Abbas as its capital. Qeshm, Kish and the other islands in the strait belong to it. The coastal plain is hot and humid and backed by mountains almost immediately, which is why the province is so thin.
Alborz: the smallest province by area, a patch of land west of Tehran around Karaj, split from Tehran in 2010. It is the one most likely to be answered as Tehran, and the other way round.
31. The most recent change was in 2010, when Alborz was created from Tehran province, taking the count from 30 to 31. Before 2004 Khorasan was a single province, and it was divided into North Khorasan, Razavi Khorasan and South Khorasan.
Ostans. Each ostan is divided into counties, called shahrestans, and those into districts (bakhsh) and rural districts (dehestan). The game accepts the English spelling and, if you switch it on in the start dialog, the Persian name.
Kerman and Sistan and Baluchestan are the two largest, each well over 150,000 square kilometres, and between them they fill most of the south-east of the country. The smallest by area is Alborz, followed by Qom.
Iran creates and renames counties regularly, and the most recent boundary file available to this site draws 429 of them from 2019, against about 445 today. A map of the counties would be missing recently created ones, so there is no counties quiz until a current source exists. The 31 provinces are unaffected.
Alborz and Tehran, since one was split from the other in 2010 and they share a border near the capital. The three Khorasans, which stack from north to south along the eastern border. And Kerman against Sistan and Baluchestan, which are both enormous and desert and sit side by side.
The other Asian administrative trainers here are Indonesia Provinces, Israel Subdistricts and Japan Prefectures. For a map of a similar size, try Turkey Provinces and Morocco Regions.
