We present Herschel observations of the core of the Perseus cluster of galaxies. Especially intriguing is the network of filaments that surround the brightest cluster galaxy, NGC 1275, previously imaged extensively in Hα and CO. In this work, we report detections of farinfrared (FIR) lines, in particular, [C II] 158, [O I] 63, [N II] 122, [O IB] 145 and [O III] 88 µm, with Herschel. All lines are spatially extended, except [O III], with the [C II] line emission extending up to 25 kpc from the core. [C II] emission is found to be co-spatial with Hα and CO. Furthermore, [C II] shows a similar velocity distribution to CO, which has been shown in previous studies to display a close association with the Hα kinematics. The spatial and kinematical correlation among [C II], Hα and CO gives us confidence to model the different components of the gas with a common heating model.With the help of FIR continuum Herschel measurements, together with a suite of coeval radio, sub-millimetre and IR data from other observatories, we performed a spectral energy distribution fitting of NGC 1275 using a model that contains contributions from dust emission as well as synchrotron active galactic nucleus emission. This has allowed us to accurately estimate the dust parameters. The data indicate a low dust emissivity index, β ≈ 1, a total dust mass close to 10 7 M , a cold dust component with temperature 38 ± 2 K and a warm dust component with temperature 116 ± 9 K. The FIR-derived star formation rate is 24 ± 1 M yr −1 , which is in agreement with the far-ultraviolet-derived star formation rate in the core, determined after applying corrections for both Galactic and internal reddening. The total IR luminosity in the range 8-1000 µm is inferred to be 1.5 × 10 11 L , making NGC 1275 a luminous IR galaxy.Herschel is an ESA space observatory with science instruments provided by European-led Principal Investigator consortia and with important participation from NASA.