Faezeh Modares
Faezeh Modares
1951/52–2017/18
Faezeh Modares (1951/52–2017/18)
Dayeh Fa’ezeh (Fa’ezeh Modarres)
1951/52–2017/18
(Sanandaj)
Justice-seeking mother; first-hand recorder of repression, prisons, clandestine burials, and everyday resistance in Iranian Kurdistan (early 1980s)
“I wrote this in the days of my loneliness… I dedicate it to the mothers who carry the grief of their children until the day they die.” — from her handwritten dedication.
Abstract
Known locally as “Dayeh Fa’ezeh,” Fa’ezeh Modarres was a central figure among Kurdish justice-seeking mothers in Sanandaj. Beyond standing at prison gates, she supported opposition logistics and wrote first-person notebooks on arrests, executions, and burial practices. Her manuscripts offer rare, non-elite, women’s testimony from within family and neighborhood life.
Biographical note (concise, dated)
- 1951/52: Born in Sanandaj (family ties to Malekshan).
- 1950s–1970s: Heavy domestic/care labor; household functioned as a local place of recourse.
- 1979–1980 (1358–1359): With families outside prisons in Sanandaj, Mariwan, Kamyaran, Tabriz to demand visitation/news.
- 1980 (1359): Islamic Republic offensives in Kurdistan; Sanandaj resists for 24 days. During this period Hamid Farshchi (her son, a schoolteacher) is killed by mortar fire.
- Early–mid 1980s: Part of informal women’s networks moving bandages, medicines, food, clothing, and messages between urban households and peshmerga units.
- 1982 (1361): In Tehran, Mas‘oud Modarres (her brother) and Fariba Farshchi (her daughter) are executed.
- From early 1980s: Tracks executions/burials; identifies fresh graves; procures sand/cement in Sanandaj and physically builds/marks graves with other mothers to prevent nameless burials.
- 2017/18 (1396): Dies in Sanandaj.
Activities & contributions (analytical)
- Prison vigilance: Persistent presence and peer-to-peer monitoring for visitation/information.
- Women’s logistics: Risky, ad-hoc courier/tender work linking city households to mountain opposition.
- Anti-erasure labor: Locating, marking, maintaining graves of the executed/battle-dead; material interventions (stone/mortar) against anonymity.
- Self-documentation: First-person notebooks preserving names/places/procedures otherwise absent in official records.
Excerpt (her voice)
“After we finally found where they had buried our children, I brought sand, cement, bricks, and tiles from Sanandaj. With my own hands—and with other mothers whose children had been executed—we started building the graves. We stayed there every day until sunset. We cried and we worked. We set the stones ourselves so that our children would not be erased.”
(From her handwritten notebooks.)
Scope & content of the notebooks
Coverage: Sanandaj and environs, early 1980s; access to prisons, visitation limits, interrogation routines, executions, burial practices, women’s logistics.
Form/voice: Retrospective first-person prose; emphasis on names, places, sequences; minimal abstraction.
Research value: Micro-social detail on carceral practice and community counter-measures; women’s labor sustaining resistance and memory; cemetery work as anti-erasure.
Limitations: Occasional missing exact dates; Kurdish/Persian toponyms; testimonial genre rather than institutional record.
Key terms (brief glossary)
- Peshmerga: Kurdish armed opposition forces.
- Anonymous/collective burials: Burials without name/notification; mothers’ counter-practice: identification and physical marking.
Provenance & access
Originals: Handwritten notebooks held by her children.
Access copy: Digital/PDF preserved by the Kurdistan Oral History archive (this website).
Related: Recorded oral testimony with her son (2024) discussing the manuscripts and family experience.
Rights & permissions
Quotations reproduced with permission of the family. For scholarly use beyond fair use, contact the archive.
Gallery
Interviews
Gholam-Reza Farshchi — son of Dayeh Fa’ezeh (Fa’ezeh Modarres) and from a justice-seeking family in Sanandaj.
He began his political activity in 1979 in Sanandaj and, after peshmerga forces were pushed out of the city, left with his sister Feryal.
He now lives outside Iran and continues his political and human-rights work. He is the brother of Hamid Farshchi (killed during Sanandaj’s 24-day resistance in 1980) and Fariba Farshchi (executed in Tehran in 1982);
his maternal uncle Masoud Modarres was also executed in Tehran in 1982.
Subject / Mother: Dayeh Fa’ezeh (Fa’ezeh Modarres)
- Interviewee & relation: Gholam-Reza Farshchi — son of Dayeh Fa’ezeh; brother of Hamid and Fariba
- Duration: 33 minutes
- Format: Audio
- Language: Persian (Farsi)
- Date: 05 June 2024
- Interviewer: name withheld
“My mother’s brother is buried in Khavaran and my sister, Fariba, in Behesht-e Zahra. I went to Khavaran with my mother; by then everything had been bulldozed flat and there were no visible markers. As we entered, my mother counted her steps—walking straight, then a few steps to the left—and said, ‘Masoud is here.’ She counted again, a few steps to the right: ‘Bijan Chehrazi is here.’ She knew these locations because when we were away with the peshmerga, she herself had visited and seen the graves.
She also pointed to a spot and said it was a mass grave of members of the Mojahedin. In less than fifteen minutes, a vehicle came down from a Revolutionary Guards outpost on the ridge and dispersed us and the other families. That outpost constantly watched the cemetery; as soon as a few dozen families gathered, they forced everyone to leave.”
Notes for context
- Khavaran cemetery: an unofficial burial ground in southeast Tehran used by authorities to inter executed political prisoners—often in unmarked graves—especially in the 1980s; areas have been repeatedly bulldozed, and families’ gatherings have been dispersed by security forces.
- Counting steps: a practical method families used to relocate graves after erasures.
- Proper names: (e.g., Masoud Modarres, Bijan Chehrazi) appear as narrated by the interviewee.