My fiancé and I arrived in Lisbon, promptly collected my maid-of-honor, my little sister Ava Hariri-Kia, and sat down for a traditional Portuguese lunch. Once we were a bottle of white wine deep, we received news of a family emergency back in Iran, which required about 10 of our family members to travel back home ASAP. Very chill way to start a wedding week.
I immediately contacted my planner, Sofia Nascimento Studios, because we had carefully concocted one 200-meter-long table to seat all of our guests. Ten people meant an entirely different seating arrangement, so we had to get to work. Luckily, this wasn’t our first rodeo: We had to make adjustments in the previous weeks after many family members were denied visas. Such is first-gen life!
Tuesday
To host the most famous wedding in the world, I had to pause promoting my sophomore novel, The Most Famous Girl in the World, which hit shelves on September 17. I spent the morning working on press releases, then turned in a round of revisions on my third novel to my editor, before putting up my OOO away message for the next three weeks.
My publisher and I had also brainstormed ways in which we could incorporate bookish elements into the wedding, and they had the brilliant idea of giving away The Most Famous Wedding in the World matchbooks. But a week before I left for Lisbon, my planner alerted me to the (very obvious in hindsight) fact that it is, actually, illegal to travel internationally with 200 matchbooks in your luggage. So, I hunkered down on my couch, turned on House of Dragon, and proceeded to empty thousands of matches into a reusable shopping bag. I swear to God, my neighbors must think I was trying to set Fort Greene on fire.
That meant Tuesday called for manually refilling every. Single. Matchbook. With fresh matches. Luckily, my stationary artist, Inês from Prettie Wedding Design, was there to lend a helping hand.
Wednesday
Thanks to Persian Standard Time, my parents arrived fashionably late on Wednesday, which meant it was time to sit down and mock up our sofreyé aghd table. This ceremonial table holds several symbolic items including a mirror representing eternity and candlesticks, a reference to a fire burning passion, and a nod to Zoroastrianism. Other items on the aghd table? Gold coins represent future prosperity, lots of fruit, a reminder of a joyous and fruitful life together, spices for the spice of life, flowers symbolizing beauty, and a book of poetry, from which the official will often read.
Photo: Courtesy of Iman Hariri-Kia
Photo: Courtesy of Iman Hariri-Kia
This was Sofia’s first Persian wedding, but my mother, Gisue Hariri, is an architect (also very type A), so she went above and beyond when designing the table, with silver from Iran, fresh fruit, wildflowers, and beautiful hand-painted Portuguese vases. A perfectly woven tapestry of three different cultures.
Thursday
Our bridal party boarded a shuttle bound 30 minutes south to Setubal, a small fisherman’s town outside of Lisbon, for our rehearsal. The wedding was to be held in a vineyard called Herdade Do Peru, and we had a lot of ground to cover. Mainly, how we would transition from our contemporary Western ceremony—which included an officiant speech, a bible reading, our own vows, and traditional ring exchanges—to our modern take on a Persian Ceremony, a.k.a. the aghd.
Photo: Courtesy of Iman Hariri-Kia
Photo: Courtesy of Iman Hariri-Kia
There are a lot of components of the aghd that are unique and tend to confuse outsiders. When the officiant—in this case, my Baba—asks the bride if she will take this man to be her husband, she must refuse to answer twice before saying yes. The goal of this practice is to make guests, and the groom, a bit nervous by making them wait. There’s audience participation, too: A guest might yell out, “The bride is in the garden picking flowers,” and other frivolous excuses. When she does eventually say yes, guests celebrate by kelling, which is a loud clicking of the tongue that sounds like lee-lee-lee. (Semi-terrifying to the virgin ear.) All of these moving pieces can shock guests who are more used to quiet, orderly ceremonies, so we needed to run through the aghd once or twice and get it right.
