Obituary: Abdolhamid Mohammadian's Persian Tea House was a fixture for Vancouver's Iranian community

Abdolhamid Mohammadian was born in 1946 in Ahvaz , a city in southern Iran .

He fled his native Iran during the bloody Iran -Iraq war in the late-1980s.

He moved to Vancouver in the early-1990s after a few years in Guelph , Ont ., which he found too cold.

For about three decades , he ran the Persian Tea House, where people would gather nightly to smoke from an assortment of hookah pipes, dance to Persian music and talk.

Smoking indoors became illegal in Vancouver in 2008 , and Mohammad fought the bylaw ban.

In 2015 , he even went on a hunger strike in protest when the city tried to close.

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