Doing good to others is not a duty. It is a joy, for it increases your own health and happiness.
—Zoroaster
The day was waning, but the heat was not. It was six o’clock, more or less, and I was watching the sun go down behind the hills to the west of Yazd, turning the rooftops and badgirs, or wind towers, the defining symbol of the city, a mystifying combination of orange and purple. I had no thermometer but guessed, by the degree of fatigue that had overcome me, that the middle of the day must have hit 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Now I was sitting in the shade on a rooftop terrace of a restaurant in the center of the city, but the tabletop was still warm to the touch. A light breeze, blowing across the rooftops, balmy and refreshing though it was, still carried the residue of the afternoon heat. I heard a sharp squeal and looked down to see a cat scamper across the terrace, the baked tile surface singeing its bare paws.
It was the time of day to take pleasure in a sundowner, so I ordered a beer from the young waiter, who offered me a bowl of crunchy nibbles after I had plopped myself down. Of course the beer contained no alcohol, the only kind available in Iran—legally, that is. I had tried several of the alcohol-free brews before, and some were downright undrinkable, but a few offered a strained resemblance to the real thing, not hard to achieve after I had been wandering around a desert city like Yazd on a blazing summer afternoon. This one made the grade.
On the Iranian landscape Yazd sits in what might be called the middle of nowhere. One of the few urban outposts in Iran’s remote southeast, it is at least four hours north of Kerman and three hours east of Esfahan, on the fringe of Iran’s fertile farmland and the beginning of the central desert that spills over into neighboring Afghanistan.
We had driven from Esfahan across two hundred miles of parched and barren landscape that one unfamiliar with the beauty of the desert might describe as sensory depriving and monotonous, but for anyone who has traveled across New Mexico or Arizona at any time of year, the slowly changing palette of colors and shifting shadows as the sun arcs across the sky can delight the eyes, providing a range of stimulation all the more enticing because of its subtlety. The air was growing noticeably warmer each time we emerged from our air-conditioned cocoon, to fill the gas tank or stock up on road snacks, so the breaks became increasingly brief, until we made only mad dashes to and from the car, where the cool air pumped from the vents was matched by the mellow chords of Dave Brubeck’s Take Five drifting from the CD player.
None of this was surprising, Yazd being one of the hottest cities in Iran in the summertime. But it is also one of the most arid in a country one friend described to me as being “as dry as a potato chip.” For four hours I had traipsed around the center of the city in the midday heat, when most of the merchants had either shuttered to take their long lunch break, Mediterranean style, or dropped the blinds in front of their windows to protect against the punishing sun, and all that time I felt not a drop of perspiration. Now, though the intense heat had passed, a wave of exhaustion rolled over me. But not a drop of sweat.
Yazd’s remote location has saved it, time and again, from the blood-spilling terror of the many invaders that have swept across the country through the centuries. Arguably, the most ruthless were the Mongols under Genghis Khan, who arrived in the middle of the thirteenth century. But slaughter elsewhere may have been a boon to the city, for many of Iran’s elites—scholars, writers, and artists—fled to remote Yazd to escape the carnage to the north and west.
Like so many cities in Iran, Yazd took its turn serving as the capital, but only briefly, under the Muzaffarid dynasty in the fourteenth century. But for centuries it played a role as a welcome stopover on the Silk Road, hosting traveling merchants passing between Afghanistan to the east and Turkey to the west. Marco Polo passed through in 1272 and paid the city polite compliments:
It is a good and noble city, and has a great amount of trade. They weave there quantities of a certain silk tissue known as Yasdi, which merchants carry into many quarters to dispose of. . . . There are many fine woods producing dates upon the way, such as one can easily ride through; and in them there is great sport to be had in hunting and hawking, there being partridges and quails and abundance of other game, so that the merchants who pass that way have plenty of diversion.
Today, in the raucous world of Iranian politics, Yazd wears no particular political stripes, for it has been home to Iranians from both ends of the spectrum, reformers and hardliners. Mohammad Ali Jafari, the current leader of the Revolutionary Guard, was born in Yazd, but so also was former president Mohammad Khatami, whose attempts at reform were stonewalled by conservative forces in the 1990s, and Mohammad Payandeh, a thorn in the side of the ruling order who was assassinated in 1998. Payandeh was a member of the Writers Association of Iran, a banned organization that has long campaigned for freedom of expression.
The boozeless beer was going down quite easily, thanks to the high-powered fridge in the interior of the café that had kept it ice cold. I ordered another, not having to worry about any debilitating surge of alcohol in the late afternoon heat. Behind me, the rattling of an air conditioner said that cooler and more comfortable seating could be had inside, but the sun had almost set, and the gentle breeze blowing across the rooftops took the edge off the heat, so I decided to stay put on the terrace and reflect on the day.
Hours earlier I had checked into the hotel and was eager to explore the city. Sohrab was content to enjoy the comfort of the hotel’s air conditioning, so he left me to wander on my own, dropping me at the looming façade of the Amir Chakhmaq Complex and then skedaddling back to his room. It wasn’t a bad idea. The Amir Chakhmaq, and the broad square laid out in front, was the best place to begin a tour of Yazd. Today the mammoth structure, with its two tapered minarets stretching ever skyward, dominates what amounts to Yazd’s central square. It was built during the fourteenth-century Teymourian dynasty by the region’s governor, Jalal Al-Din Amir Chakhmaq, with the advice and guidance of his wife, Fatemeh Khatoon. In its prime the complex contained a bazaar where passing traders would stock up on much-needed supplies as they made their way along the Silk Road, and there was a caravansary where they could rest their camels, and themselves, before pushing on.
The Amir Chakhmaq Complex started as a mosque, and as it evolved it retained the two towering minarets. Inside one, a circular staircase rises and twists as it gradually narrows, until it reaches a vantage point that looks out on the city and the desert beyond. Never mind the heat—the promise of the view was too tempting—so I began the climb, rising step by step as the cylinder became tighter and narrower but provided a needed buffer from the afternoon heat. Suddenly the steps ended, and the stairway gave way to an uninterrupted view of the city and open desert that swept in all directions.
A view from any height can draw everything around into focus. From the minaret’s almost tip-top it was possible to see, in literal terms, the importance of a place like Yazd and what it must have meant to tired traders making their way between the green, fertile provinces of western Iran and the raw, rugged mountains of Afghanistan. Just beyond the longer, broader streets of the newer sections of the city lay the tight, twisting lanes of the original city of Yazd, the pathways and snug mud-and-plaster buildings wrapping around each other to guard against the vast, forbidding, and frightening void that encircled the city on all sides.
Medieval Yazd would have been the Manhattan of Iran, or Persia, as Iran was then known, if prominence was measured by the height of its buildings and the dramatic skyline that they created. The minarets of Amir Chakhmaq, as imposing as they appear, are not the tallest structures in Yazd. That honor goes to the minarets of the central mosque, tucked within the side streets in the center of the city. The mosque dates to the twelfth century and is still the primary place of prayer for the city’s faithful. In keeping with the spirit of conquest that reigned over Yazd in medieval times, the mosque was built on the site of a Zoroastrian fire temple constructed in the fifth century during the Sassanid era of pre-Islamic Persia. It was constructed by Ala’oddoleh Garshasb at the beginning of Persia’s fertile medieval period, but two hundred years later the civic powers decided it needed an overhaul, which took forty years. Over time, which means centuries by Iranian time, three mosques were constructed on the site, the first dating to the tenth century. Three hundred years later a second was added, and in the fifteenth century Rokn-el-din Mohammad Ghazi added a third. But in the nineteenth century the Qajar rulers decided enough was enough, and rather than add a fourth, they incorporated them all into one.
It was worth a look. I climbed down from the balcony of the minaret one careful step at a time and left the cooling comfort for Yazd’s blazing streets. I walked slowly, looking for patches of shade under the shop awnings, but found myself detouring through Yazd’s traditional market. I had been to Yazd before, in the summer of 2009, when the country was rocked by a widely disputed presidential election. The U.S. had just been rocked by the election of the country’s first African American president. I was wearing a T-shirt with “NYC” stitched in bold letters on the chest, and after I had passed the market stalls, one of the shopkeepers emerged to shout, “I like your president!” But no shopkeepers greeted me today, perhaps because my T-shirt didn’t point to any American identity. Or perhaps today was simply hotter.
After some twists and turns through Yazd’s back streets I found the mosque. But the circular, soaring minarets aren’t its most impressive feature, even if they do soar above the skyline of Yazd. No, they are outdone by the façade, a masterpiece of tile work elaborately decorated in geometric patterns of blues ranging from deep cobalt to turquoise and soft ermine. The designs begin at the base and extend up the front of the entrance, shifting patterns several times all the way to the top of the minaret. Just inside the entrance, Quranic verses in rigid Kufic script decorate the iwan, extending up one side of the enormous archway and down the other. I have always thought this was one of the most attractive features in any mosque, not only in Iran but anywhere in the Islamic world. Whether I could read the text or even grasp its meaning didn’t matter. What was important was not what the words said but what they symbolized—the fusion of beauty and thought, artistry and ideas, into a single expression in which each served the other and represented a level of beauty that neither could achieve on its own.
I passed through the portal and entered the shabestan, or small foyer, that separated the inner courtyard from the prayer hall. Immediately the temperature dropped ten degrees. The dark gloom was another sharp change from the afternoon sun. It took a moment for the eyes to adjust, and as they did, the mosque’s caretaker appeared—an old man in a tattered sport jacket, his head topped with a lace prayer cap. He shuffled so slowly his shoes barely came off the ground. His eyes, accustomed to the dark, widened with a hint of surprise upon greeting a foreigner—or he could have been shocked by seeing anyone around and about in the middle of a summer afternoon. He shuffled closer, raised his eyes, and asked, “Your country?” He made it sound like the answer was a password to gain entrance, or that he collected the nationalities of visitors like some people collect bottle caps.
I told him, and his face dropped a little. He looked almost weary.
“You like Obama?” he asked.
“I like Obama.” I told him.
“Obama was good,” he added.
I gave a thumbs-up.
“America and Iran—don’t have to fight,” he continued. “America and Iran—friends.”
I gave another thumbs-up.
“Iran doesn’t want fight, not anyone, not America. Obama no fight. Obama was good.”
“Friends,” I said, and extended a hand. He raised a limp palm and shook, and a little brightness came into his eyes.
Satisfied that Barak Obama’s popularity had held up among mosque caretakers, I removed my shoes and padded around the prayer hall. Above the shabestan, a dome was decorated in blue geometric patterns. The mehrab, the semicircular niche in the wall pointing toward Mecca, stretched toward the ceiling in the manner of a gothic cathedral. The interior was at least as stunning as the outside, and I thought it a shame that so much beauty had been hidden away. But this could be seen another way—that the architect had so many beautiful plans for the mosque that, once the exterior was wrapped in glittering blue geometric designs, he could afford to discard the leftover, like a dressmaker tossing away useless fabric.
I returned to the sunny streets, where the occasional errand-goer, darting from air-conditioned shop to air-conditioned shop, was the only sign of life. Yazd can be a quiet, sleepy place, especially in the middle of a summer afternoon. But whenever I was about to write it off as nothing more than a quiet, sleepy place, I remembered Sohrab’s reply when I asked where in Iran he would prefer to live. We were driving across the desert and had seen many cities, and he knew next to everything about them, the nooks and crannies of their history, both ancient and recent, and what they were all about in the present day. It was only natural to wonder, did he have a favorite? After returning from the U.S., he had settled in Shiraz, where the liberal environment allowed him to keep his extensive wine collection out of view of the authorities. But the city was never his first choice.
“Probably Yazd,” he said.
I was surprised, asked him to elaborate.
“It’s quiet and a little more traditional. It’s far away from the big cities. It has more of the feel of the real Iran.”
Yazd is definitely quieter and more “traditional” than Tehran and many of the other major cities, but of course that depends on how one defines “traditional.” However this is worked out among the sociologists who try to define contemporary Iran, Yazd does offer an experience that is quintessential in the Middle East—getting lost in the torturous, winding lanes of the Old City.
Yazd dates to Sassanid times, and during the medieval period the centers of towns were purposely designed to create labyrinthine confusion to befuddle invaders who managed to pierce the city’s fortifications. In this way the local residents would have a distinct advantage over an invading army, which would inevitably get lost in the illogical array of alleys and lanes.
Fortified by two pleasantly cool but boozeless beers, I felt enough confidence to plunge into Yazd’s Old City, if only to see if I could find my way to the main street on the other side. I quickly learned that the scourge of any Old City is uniformity. After a few twists and turns, everything looked alike. The plain, dun-colored walls of the houses that lined the crooked lanes had no distinctive features except for the occasional electrical box or dual door knockers—a larger one for men who came calling, a smaller one for women, to alert the residents of the gender of the guest they were about to receive. The wood-carved front doors showed a hint of individuality, but only for a trained eye, one that can identify a pattern of design from a particular part of the country, not an overheated foreigner trying to find his way through the tanglework of streets.
Centuries ago, Silk Road travelers would rely on the stars to guide them, and so they often traveled at night, when the punishing afternoon heat had abated and the skies were aglow with celestial signposts. But now the sun had yet to set, and so the sky was still a uniform, cloudless blue. For me, it offered little help. I crisscrossed and doubled back over familiar ground and recognized landmarks I had passed several times—the shape of a door knocker, the colors of the flowers in a window box.
Then something changed. I remembered the advice of the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu: “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” Then it became a pleasure to be utterly, completely, and totally lost. I turned right and left, and left and right, without feeling a hint of embarrassment seeing couples zipping by on motorbikes, brazenly sure of their destinations as well as the quickest ways to reach them. Usually the men straddled the driver’s seat, while the women, their flowing black chadors flapping in the breeze, held tight from behind as the horn beeped to warn any traffic approaching from the blind corners.
Another realization appeared—that I wasn’t lost at all, except in terms of geography. I was beginning to appreciate what Lao Tzu had advised—to dismiss the notion of a destination and appreciate the journey itself. And I was moving closer, deliberately, and without any twists or turns to an important observation—that in the midst of the most maddening disorder, human beings will establish their own patterns to overcome any chaos that threatens them. In American mythology this came to be called “taming the frontier.” In today’s Iran it means finding a way to live in the Islamic Republic.
I kept winding through the Old City, trying to find the way out to the main street, where I could find a taxi back to my hotel. The stone maze was little different from other “Old Cities” in other parts of the Middle East. Cats skittered across the burning pavement in search of a patch of shade or a few scraps of food. Whenever the alleys converged to form a pint-size square, a group of boys could be found kicking a football against an empty wall while their sisters watched from surrounding front stoops.
I turned down another lane that appeared empty, but then spotted a middle-aged woman shrouded in a full chador and face veil sitting on a plastic chair outside the door of a bungalow. At first I went unnoticed because she was popping the stems off a pile of green beans and dropping the beans into a plastic bowl sitting on a small table. When the sound of my footsteps grew close, she looked up and showed no surprise at the sight of a foreigner traipsing through her neighborhood. As I passed, she nodded politely and extended a soft greeting: “Salaam,” she said.
“Salaam,” I replied.
It was the simplest of moments, but one that said a great deal about gender relations in Iran and the Arab world. I had traveled to many Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa, and I could never imagine a local woman extending a greeting to a foreign man, certainly not a woman dressed in conservative garb. One could stretch the imagination to conceive of something like this happening in one of the more cosmopolitan cities, like Cairo, Damascus, or Beirut, where social codes are more relaxed and foreigners abound, but in the backstreets of a remote regional city? Hardly.
It reminded me of another incident that occurred earlier that day. At the intersection in front of the Amir Chakhmaq Complex, a woman crossed the street and approached a taxi driver waiting for a fare. She wasn’t looking for a ride, she just needed directions, and after she had posed her question, the driver pointed down the street and then to the left and then to the right and finished with a gesture that indicated stop. The woman thanked him and left. He resumed his chat with another driver. It was a simple interaction that occurs a million times a day all over the world, but here it resonated. In conservative parts of the Arab world I couldn’t imagine a local woman casually speaking to a taxi driver, or any strange man, for any reason. If she needed directions, and there were no women in sight, she would have wandered lost before she would have approached an unrelated male. Here, there were many women she could have sought directions from, but she didn’t, obviously, and correctly, thinking a taxi driver would have the most reliable answer. That he was a male, and an unrelated male, didn’t matter.
Yazd had other surprises. After a few more twists and turns I finally emerged onto the main street and hailed a taxi. Ten minutes later we pulled up to the entrance of the hotel, and I handed the driver a 100,000-rial note, more than enough to cover the fare. I stepped away, and he called after me.
“Too much,” he said, in passable English, and gave me 50,000 rials change. At first I was sure the heat had addled my brain, but no, Yazd had a taxi driver who actually handed cash back when he was overpaid. He pulled away, and I was left holding a 50,000-rial note.
The hotel where my tour operator had stashed me was a new addition to Yazd, but it had been built to resemble an elaborate residence from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, with the rooms facing a central courtyard and the requisite pool and bubbling fountain. Each morning I had breakfast at one of the courtyard tables with Laurel and Hardy, the names I had given to the two parakeets that spent most of the day perched on the crossbeams of two wooden posts near the breakfast tables. I called them Laurel and Hardy because they spent most of their time fluttering and slapping each other with thickly feathered wings and squawking in what sounded like garbled Farsi, much like the comic duo, without the Farsi, from the early days of cinema. Laurel was colored deep red, with white feathers under his chin. Hardy was pleasingly plump, with a thick cover of ermine blue feathers and a tail that flopped furiously every time he let out a sharp squawk or screech, or whenever the antics of Laurel left him flustered. After a few days, I noticed a pattern in their diurnal rhythms: Hardy was more of an early bird, for he usually won the morning spats, while Laurel came alive in the afternoons, after I had returned from a day’s sightseeing and was enjoying a boozeless beer. Then he shrieked more loudly and poked Hardy with his beak because his guard was down. The battles continued the entire time I was in Yazd—Laurel and Hardy, or Hardy and Laurel, sharing the same perch but never at peace. Always they found something to bicker over—a prize morsel scooped off a breakfast plate, or the direction of the wind when there was nothing else to rile their feathers.
Laurel and Hardy’s antics aside, the courtyard was an ideal setting for breakfast. In those brief moments when Laurel and Hardy paused in their bickering, the tinkling of the fountain overcame all other sounds, the blue tiles beneath the water reflected the overhead sky, and a light morning breeze, which had yet to bear the blazing heat of day, stirred the branches of the trees that arched overhead.
It would have been easy to never emerge for breakfast at all, but stay in the cool cocoon of my room. It was decorated like a museum, littered with gewgaws that evoked the glories of the Silk Road. Standing on the tables, and tucked into wall niches that served the purpose of shelves, were ceramic vases and pots and metalwork, a specialty of Yazd, in the form of a brass ewer and a serving tray decorated in ornate floral patterns. Standing on the side tables were glass beakers and a pair of brass candlesticks, and lying on the floor was a trio of hand-woven carpets. As beautiful as these items appeared, they were just a sampling of what, over the years, had been loaded onto the backs of camels before beginning the long trek eastward, into neighboring Afghanistan and then Pakistan.
Trade along the Silk Road began in the third century, during the brief Parthian dynasty. Tucked between the Achaemenid and Sassanid dynasties, the Parthian period had rulers who saw the value of the overland trade and placed a tax on all goods entering from the east. The trade was so important to the wealth of both Iran and China that the Chinese dispatched two negotiators to Iran to argue for the free flow of goods. The cities along the road, not only Yazd but Kerman, Islamabad, Tous, Peshawar, Bukhara, Kabul, and Herat, grew into wealthy trading centers with storehouses of valuable goods. In the courtyards of the caravansaries that surrounded the local bazaars, the languages spoken represented the lands that stretched from the Mediterranean to the Pacific—Turkish and Arabic, Farsi and Hindi, Uzbek, Kazakh, and Chinese.
The trade continued for over a thousand years, until improvements in boatbuilding technology made sea travel far safer and faster than the overland caravan routes, constantly vulnerable to sandstorms and plagued with bandits. But almost until the time of the European Renaissance, more goods of greater value were transported by the Silk Road caravans than any other trade route in human history. And more than goods were exchanged. Islam, along with the languages and cultures of the Muslim world, was carried east. Buddhism, along with spices, silk, and precious stones—jade and emeralds, rubies and sapphires—was brought west. On a side table in my room was a small porcelain vase decorated in floral patterns, with a mountain scene and flock of birds that marked it as a product of China.
I could have remained in my room all morning and imagined myself the driver of a caravan sometime back in the first millennium, but the illusion would never have held up, for no camel driver worth a dirham would have wasted precious time admiring his own goods. Also, this was Yazd, and so the day demanded a visit to the place of fire, or temple of fire, formally known as the Yazd Atash Behram, one of the primary places of worship for local Zoroastrians and a place of pilgrimage for the religion’s global followers.
If I had expected the Yazd Atash Behram to be a massive chunk of stone trying to mimic the temples of ancient Greece or Rome, I would have been disappointed. But I had no expectations, and so I wasn’t. In practice, Zoroastrian fire temples are typically simple affairs. The notion that the scale of the building should reflect the greatness of the deity it is meant to celebrate is a concept alien to Zoroastrianism. The Yazd Atash Behram is no different. Tucked into a sleepy back street lined with cypress and cedar trees, the Atash Behram better resembles a bourgeois manor house from somewhere in southeastern Europe. Built in 1934, its sole reason for being is to house an atash behram, or “victorious fire”—a continuously burning flame of which there are only nine in the world. The other eight are in India.
The story of the flame is far more interesting than any building that could house it. If the tale is to be believed, it was first lit by the shah of the Sassanid dynasty in a fire temple in the district of Larestan in 470 CE. It was then moved to the city of Aqda, where it continued to burn for seven hundred years before it was relocated again, in 1173, to the nearby city of Ardakan. This time its stay was relatively brief—only three hundred years—before it was shipped to Yazd, where it is now tended by a Zoroastrian priest.
Because of the number of tourists that traipse through, the Atash Behram breaks with some of the conventions of the traditional fire temple. It has an observation area for non-Zoroastrians to observe the long-burning flame, still alight in a bronze vase behind a curtain of tinted glass. A touch of verisimilitude is preserved, for behind the tinted glass the chamber surrounding the flame is dark except for the glow emanating from the flame itself, all designed to simulate the gloom of the inner sanctum of a Zoroastrian temple, where the flame would normally be burning.
To imagine what it would have been like to have been an ancient follower of Zoroastrianism, I transported myself back a couple thousand years, when the world’s first monotheistic religion dominated the Persian Empire. Entering a fire temple, I would be barefoot and dressed in white, with a white cap to cover my head. If my wife was with me, which would have been possible, for there is no segregation of the sexes in Zoroastrian customs, she would also be clad in white, and her head would be covered with a white headscarf. I would hand an offering of sweet-smelling sandalwood to the priest, who would take it to the inner sanctum and place it on the fire using a pair of silver tongs. He would return bearing some of the ashes in a ladle, which I would smudge onto my eyelids and forehead. There would be no sermon, because the role of the priest is not to preach but receive the faithful and tend the sacred fire.
The fire temple itself is something of an anachronism, for the use of a temple to house the sacred flame would have been alien to very early Zoroastrians. The Greek historian Herodotus described Zoroastrians in the fifth century BCE climbing to the tops of small hills to perform their fire ceremonies. The designation of fire to represent the spiritual core of the Zoroastrian belief system developed centuries later, as the imagery of light became associated with the essence of spirituality in many other faiths. “The Lord went in front of them in a pillar of cloud by day to lead them along the way, and in a pillar of fire by night, to give them light,” reads the Book of Exodus, recounting the guidance the Israelites received while they wandered in the desert for forty years. The Christian Jesus is often described as “The Light of the World.” “The Lord is my light and my salvation,” and “In thy light we shall see light,” reads the Book of Psalms. “Let us walk in the light of the Lord,” said the Prophet Isaiah, for “the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light.”
The dark-light polarity carried far beyond Zoroastrianism to the traditions of other faiths. Among the ancient Hebrews, the Qumran sect separated its own into the saved (“children of light”) and the damned (“children of darkness”). In the Chinese dichotomy of yin and yang, yang is light—ethereal and productive, and therefore a force for good—while yin is the reverse. The Hindu wintertime festival of Diwali celebrates the triumph of light over spiritual darkness. Gnostic thought, which developed in the first and second centuries, saw light and darkness representing spirit and matter, but the two are not equals in any spiritual sense. Evil forces arise from the material world, and there the human being acquires salvation by abandoning it for the world of light.
In many other belief systems light represents enlightenment, or the illumination of the mind as well as the spirit. In the mythology of ancient Egypt, Apophis, the monster of darkness, represented by a serpent, each day threatens to devour Ra, the sun god. Of course he fails, and each day a new day dawns. The Pharaoh Amenhotep IV tried to create a sun cult in Egypt, but his tiptoe into monotheism was quashed by the religious powers. One of the major festivals on the ancient Roman calendar was one that paid homage to Sol Invictus, or the “Invincible Sun.” In the Aztec and Mayan belief systems, human sacrifices were needed to preserve a world order that was represented by the continuing life of the sun. Fast-forward to the present day: Let us not forget the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where memory of the fallen is symbolized by the eternal flame, never to be extinguished, just like the fire in the Yazd Atash Behram, which has burned much longer.
Almost all religions acquire some of their appeal through a dose of mysticism and mystery, and the origins of Zoroastrianism are a little more mysterious than most. According to the Gathas, seventeen hymns composed by Zoroaster himself and included in the Avesta, Zoroastrianism’s primary scripture, the prophet was born somewhere near the border of Iran and present-day Afghanistan, perhaps as far back as 1500 BCE. He had six children, three boys and three girls, and he died around the age of seventy-seven. Most important, he is credited with bringing into the world the belief in a single, universal force from which all spiritual power emanates, in other words, the concept of monotheism. What is also known is that Zoroaster grew disenchanted with the popular polytheism of his time, with its ritual animal sacrifices and use of hallucinogenic plants in religious ceremonies. According to orthodox Zoroastrianism—in keeping with the myths familiar to other religions—Zoroaster retreated into the wilds and received a vision that became the foundation of his theology and a new way of framing the spiritual world. This attributed all of creation to a single source—Ahura Mazda, or the “Wise Lord.”
According to the Zoroastrian view, the universe is riven by two competing forces: one that embodies the values of order, creation, and truth, or Asha; and one that is reflected in the negative forces of chaos, deceit, disorder, and “uncreation,” or Druj. Humans are caught up in this cosmic battle with an obligation to defend the forces of Asha against those of Druj. The task, as monumental as it sounds, is relatively simple. The responsibility of the human being is to combat Asha and Druj by promoting, and articulating, the three cardinal principles of Zoroastrianism: good thoughts (humata), good words (hukhta), and good deeds (hvarshta).
Another fundamental principle of Zoroastrianism is the concept of free will. It thoroughly rejects any notion of predestination, common in Indian theology, and also the ancient Greek concept of Fate. The Zoroastrian believes that it is positive actions that quell the dark forces of the universe. Action is a necessary part of human existence and a potential force for good. To take this a step further, asceticism is spurned because it demands the denial of life experiences, even simple pleasure, which can fuel the forces of order. No Zoroastrian priest would think of retreating from the world like a Christian or Buddhist monk, for it is engagement with the world through positive, self-directed action that leads to the supremacy of Asha.
It can’t be denied that there is a hint of self-interest in performing good works, for performing them also brings goodness to oneself, and in this respect Zoroastrianism could be seen as dipping into the Hindu notion of karma, or “what goes around comes around.”
What is striking about many of the precepts of Zoroastrianism is how they laid the foundation for those of both Christianity and Islam, at the time still invisible on the theological horizon. Zoroastrianism advanced the concept of a dual universe, the individual possessing free will, the notions of heaven and hell as well as Judgment Day and the arrival of a messiah. In the Zoroastrian view, the end of time will be the victory of Ahura Mazda over the dark forces of existence, embodied in Angra Mainyu, which Christians came to call the “evil spirit.” Also, a savior will arrive (Saoshyant), who will revive the dead spirits, and all the world’s souls will then be judged according to their thoughts, words, and actions as they cross over the bridge that leads to the world beyond the earthly one. But humans are not alone throughout their earthly journey. Each is accompanied by a guardian spirit, or fravashi, which will be on hand to meet them at the final judgment.
Contrary to both Christianity and Islam, a whiff of animism can be found in Zoroastrianism, for Zoroaster believed that the fundamental spiritual forces of the universe were to be found in the natural elements of earth, wind, water, and fire—wind as opposed to air because wind can be experienced in physical reality, while air remains abstract and ethereal, disconnected from physical, sensory experience. Furthermore, according to Zoroastrianism, fire and water are not opposing forces (there is a limit to duality, even in Zoroastrianism). Both possess purifying qualities and were the last to be created in the birth of the universe. To expand the dualistic view even further, according to Zoroastrianism, fire emerged from water, and it is fire that is the source of wisdom. Consequently, it is at the fire temple where Zoroastrians worship, and the image of fire, or light, has become the symbol of insight or inspiration throughout human history.
Zoroaster had little luck selling his radical theological views to the Persians of eastern Iran. The religious powers saw his attack on ritual and his adherence to the belief in a single deity as an affront to the ruling order. After twelve years of proselytizing, he gained only one convert—his cousin—so he relocated to western Iran, where he had better luck. The king and queen of Bactria favored his views after hearing him debate the local religious authorities and decided to make Zoroastrianism the state religion.
Slowly but surely, Zoroaster’s beliefs gained currency and began to spread throughout ancient Persia, so that by the beginning of the Achaemenid era, around 500 BCE, they had become the accepted faith of the Persian people. Zoroastrianism soon spread to the outer reaches of the empire, north to Armenia and Azerbaijan, and even beyond the empire, southeast to India. It suffered a setback in the fourth century BCE, following the invasion of Alexander the Great. The Greek conquerors burned the Avesta, Zoroastrianism’s sacred text, which contain the Gathas, poems written by Zoroaster that express his fundamental beliefs.
Still, Zoroastrianism recovered, and all was well for the next thousand years. Then, in the middle of the seventh century, came the Arab invasion and with it the Islamic faith that had already swept the Arabian Peninsula. Defeats in the battles of Qadisiya and Nahavand spelled the end of the Sassanid Empire and sent Zoroastrianism on the run. Fire temples were destroyed or converted into mosques, and many of the faithful fled inland, seeking protection in the greater isolation of the desert cities, such as Yazd.
At first, the Arab-Muslim ruling caliphate in Damascus took a benign attitude toward the Zoroastrian Persians. There was little pressure to convert to Islam, but over time discriminating taxes and other oppressive polices stigmatized the Zoroastrians. Two hundred years later, rule over Persia passed to the Abbasid caliphate operating out of Baghdad, resulting in increasing oppression and even humiliation of the Zoroastrians. In the cities, where the ruling authorities could often persuade the local population to convert by offering economic enticements and other advantages, Islam was able to spread more quickly. The rural areas saw resistance harden, but by the tenth and eleventh centuries, Islam had become the dominant faith of previously Zoroastrian Persia, and the religion that had once spread across the empire was consigned to the hinterlands.
There are few issues in Iran that don’t reflect the ever-growing rift between the more secular-minded city dwellers and the theologically driven religious figures in the government, and there is no reason why Zoroastrianism would be an exception. This is fully on display on the last Tuesday before March 21, or Noruz, the Persian New Year. This is the night of Chaharshanbeh-Souri, or the fire-jumping tradition, in which small bonfires are made both in the smallest villages and the residential streets of major cities, and celebrants take turns leaping over the flames so that the purifying element of fire will “burn away” the residue of the passing year and ignite the force of a new beginning.
After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, religious authorities went to great lengths to suppress the tradition. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has since called it “irrational,” ignoring the fact that few religious beliefs are based on reason, and another ayatollah, Makarem Shirazi, decried it as “unworthy of a Muslim.” But in recent years, the government has largely abandoned its attempt to obliterate a three-thousand-year-old tradition and the people’s desire to embrace it.
There is little doubt that the newfound popularity of Zoroastrianism has arisen as pushback against the imposition of strict Islamic practices. There is also little doubt that the seventh-century Arab invasion and the repressive policies and persecutions that followed find resonance in the Islamic regime’s own policies of repression and imposition of what it believes to be “pure” Islamic practices. To favor Zoroastrianism is therefore not only to respect Iran’s ancient culture but to make a political statement.
As he weaved through the Tehran traffic, I listened to the rants of a disillusioned taxi driver: “We have too much of this religion—religion, religion, religion. Too many laws, too much religion in life. What do we really need?”
He added a dramatic pause.
“Good thoughts. Good words. Good deeds,” he said, laying out the fundamental principles of Zoroastrianism. “What else is important? Good thoughts. Good words. Good deeds.”
Dangling from his rearview mirror was a pendant in the form of the faravahar, the universal symbol of Zoroastrianism—a giant pair of wings extending from the profile of a bearded priest. Plastered on his rear window was a sticker with the image of the faravahar, but also hanging from the rearview mirror was a nazar, the cobalt-blue talisman believed to ward off the evil eye, found on the ends of key chains and featured on necklaces sold in tourist shops throughout the Middle East.
“There wasn’t nearly as much interest in Zoroastrianism before the Islamic Revolution,” an Iranian scholar and former professor at Tehran University told me. “Today it’s a symbolic form of rebellion. Zoroastrianism is something the government had tried to suppress and even denied its importance in Iran’s history. To many hardline clerics, Iran’s ‘real’ history begins with the arrival of Islam, and they want everyone to see Iran the same way. But there was a lot of history before Islam ever arrived, so the Persian identity is much more complex than they want us to believe.”
On occasion the fire-jumping tradition has almost abandoned its spiritual meaning entirely and entered into the realm of political expression. During the 2009 postelection demonstrations, antigovernment protestors consigned posters bearing the likenesses of then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei to bonfires set up in the side streets of Tehran and other cities, and then leaped over them with shouts of “Death to the dictator!”
I asked my professor friend if there wasn’t a great deal of reflexive rebellion at play.
“Absolutely,” he began. “What the government tells us to reject, we embrace. What they say is bad we think must be good. And that holds true in almost every aspect of life—religion, politics, even entertainment. The more they criticize the U.S. and the West, the more popular the U.S. and the West become. The more they warn us of the influence of foreign cultures, the more people want American movies, want to study in the U.S. But there’s more than just reflexive rebellion going on. The government wants to define everything about what it means to be Iranian in terms of Islam, so keeping practices like fire-jumping alive is a way of saying there is much more to the Persian identity.”
The Yazd fire temple may host the longest-burning flame in the world, but it isn’t Zoroastrianism’s most commanding monument in the city. That honor would have to go to the two looming dakhmas, or “Towers of Silence,” just outside Yazd, where the city meets the vast Bafgh Desert. There was just enough time to make a quick tour before the arrival of the searing afternoon heat, so Sohrab and I hopped in the car and headed out to the archaeological park that has put Yazd on Iran’s map of religious history.
A Tower of Silence, simply put, is a Zoroastrian cemetery, or, to be more precise, a place for the final resting of the dead. It can’t be called a burial ground because, in the Zoroastrian tradition, corpses are not interred in the earth. The reason has to do with Zoroastrian cosmology. A dead body represents decay, or—in Zoroastrian parlance—“uncreation,” and is therefore nasu, or “unclean.” To inter a dead body is to risk the corruption of the earth, one of the four sacred elements. Consequently, Zoroastrians adopted the practice of the “sky burial”—exposing dead bodies to the open air, where the flesh would quickly decompose from its exposure to the sun, and vultures and other carrion birds would pick off the remains. The bones would then be placed in a pit, where they would gradually return to dust.
The structure for the sky burial became the Tower of Silence. Zoroastrians arranged their dead in three concentric circles around the top of a stone tower—men in the outer ring, women in the middle, children in the center. Herodotus observed the practice of sky burial among Zoroastrians in what is now Turkey, but there is no record of towers serving as the platform for the dead until the ninth century CE. The tradition continued without a hitch throughout the gradual but steady Islamization of Iran until the nineteenth century, when the Dar ul-Funun madresse was founded by Amir Kabir in Tehran. Students had no corpses for the study of anatomy because Islamic law forbids dissection, so the towers of silence were regularly robbed of their dead to aid the growing interest in medical research.
In the middle of a summer afternoon the eerie, empty, sun-bleached desert surrounding the towers did evoke the silence of the dead, but the effect was much different from the first time I was here, in 2009. Then there was little silence to be found, not only in Yazd but throughout Iran. The postelection demonstrations had been in full swing, and the upheaval managed to rouse, if not Zoroastrian spirits, the ire of the ticket taker at the entrance booth.
“Where is he from?” he asked Sohrab, after I had paid the entrance fee and was handed my ticket.
Sohrab told him.
“America!” he quipped. “America! Then he knows about elections! What does he think of ours?” Without waiting for a reply, he continued with his own diatribe: “Those bastards at the top think they’re going to steal this one from us, that they can step all over us. They aren’t going to get away with it! Tell him!”—He nodded toward me.—“Tell him that we can have a democratic system. We can have one here just like there is in America! That’s all that we want, fair elections, just like they have in America, but it’s not going to happen until we get rid of the whole lot of them!”
The elections were several years in the past, even though their memory had yet to decay, like the ancient corpses. What had gone sour was whatever remaining trust the people had in the government and the ruling clerics. But if today’s ticket taker had any gripes, and there could be many—the economy, the irresponsible leadership, runaway inflation, widespread corruption, the international sanctions that had torn at the fabric of day-to-day life—he was as mute as the dead. He handed me my ticket and a map of the site and retreated to his seat in the comforting cool of the entrance booth.
Zoroastrians typically built their towers of silence outside the cities to separate them from ongoing earthly life, just as medieval Europeans created cemeteries beyond the boundaries of the walled town. Often Zoroastrians chose the tops of hills or any rises in the landscape in order to bring the dead closer to the heavenly life where they were bound. The two towers of silence outside Yazd follow this pattern. Perched on top of a pair of hills no more than a few hundred feet apart, they better resemble the ruins of hilltop fortresses, or a pair of watchtowers placed outside the city to warn of an approaching army. I thought it was too late in the day for a climb to the top, without a postage stamp of shade to ease the way, but then I spotted two figures on the horizon line nearing the top of the first tower, and thought—why not?
It was easier than I expected. I was ready for a grinding slog that would only become more grueling as it went on, but I hadn’t factored in the sauna-dry Iranian air, and I hadn’t counted on a light breeze blowing across the desert to create the illusion that the climb could actually be a refreshing stretch of the legs on a summer afternoon. The trail steepened, and my leg muscles tightened, but again, I felt not a drop of sweat. The breeze picked up, so hot it burned the surfaces of my eyes. Eventually my breath shortened, and it took more work to mount each step. I stopped to rest every forty or fifty feet, looking out to scan the boundless stretch of desert in one direction and Yazd itself, beginning to appear far below, in the other. That was enough to make the final push.
Coming from a longstanding tradition that associates death with darkness and interment in the earth, I found it hard to see the top of the tower as a final resting place for the dead. But that was what made the climb worthwhile, confronting the great differences that exist between cultures in concepts of death and all of its attendant imagery. Death, signifying interment in the earth, had no place in the cosmology of the Zoroastrians. As a sacred element, earth was responsible for generating life and was therefore diametrically opposed to the concept of death, like two magnets with conflicting energies. Death was associated with the sky and the promise of heavenly life, and this necessarily meant the abandonment of the earth. The very concept of the cemetery, or any burial ground, was antithetical to the Zoroastrian concepts of natural law and the order of the universe.
I sat on the tower’s crumbling stone wall to reflect on all this, and to look out at the boundless desert, shimmering in the afternoon sun. Centuries ago, a caravan of camels might have been seen on the horizon, vague, indistinct, even inconsequential in relation to the landscape it would have been crossing. The desert became a metaphor for earthly existence, and the tower that once held human bodies at the end of their passage through life, offering them up to the heavens, affirmed the same message.
I could have scrambled down the trail that led to the opposite slope and tried to make it to the top of the second tower, but on this hot summer afternoon, one tower ascent was enough. The second tower would have only duplicated the same experience, and the heat was rising. The breeze blowing across the plain had reached the eyeball-singeing temperature that meant the peak of the day’s heat had been reached. Fortunately, the way back to the entrance booth and parking lot was all downhill, and so I scrambled down the trail with the direct rays of the sun now scorching the surfaces of the rocks and raising watery, rippling waves of heat from the sunbaked landscape.
Sohrab and I could have headed back to Yazd and holed up at the hotel for the rest of the day, but there was another way to beat the heat. We got back in the car, careful not to touch any surface that had been exposed to the sun while the car was roasting in the lot, and drove about twenty minutes until we arrived at a tall, beehive-like building that in scale and form could have doubled as a giant Hershey’s kiss, with a squat, circular foundation that tapered to a pinpoint top. It was made of brick, and its plain exterior said nothing about its reason for being. Sohrab tugged the door open, and a rush of cool air poured out. We stepped inside, and the inner chill embraced us like a bear hug. But even more stunning than the temperature drop was the enormous, cavernous space and the vital purpose it had once served for the residents of Yazd.
From the ground up, the interior was an enormous cone that narrowed as it rose to a peephole at the tip-top that opened to the blue summer sky. Below ground level was an enormous pit, equal in size to the spacious empty cone that rose above. It would have been the mother-of-all sinkholes if this had been a naturally occurring sinkhole, but it wasn’t. The pit had been dug deep into the earth to take advantage of the subterranean cooler temperature for the preservation of ice. Yes, ice. Living in a harsh desert climate like Yazd’s taught the Yazdis to appreciate whatever luxuries the punishing environment could offer, and one—when coupled with a bit of ingenuity—was ice. Ice gathered from the nearby mountains in winter could be preserved for the residents of Yazd to provide them with cool drinks in the summer months, and even more ice could be made when the supply ran low. The cone over the pit, and the entire structure, is a yakhchal, what many Iranians still call their refrigerators at home. Today, many may be imported from China, South Korea, or Germany, but they remain, in traditional Persian terminology, yakhchals.
The yakhchal was a marvel of Persian engineering that saw its beginning in the fourth century BCE. In the winter months, frigid water from the mountains around Yazd was carried through the qanats, or aqueducts, into the yakhchals, where it froze in the subterranean pit. The design of the yakhchal allowed any warm air to rise to the top of the dome and escape through the vents, drawing down the temperature in the space below. The thick walls of the conical dome insulated the interior from the warmer outside air, from winter into spring and on into the summer months, when the ice was ready to make faloodeh, a popular frozen dessert made from sugar, rose water, and tiny noodles that is as old as the fifth century BCE.
Similar technology was used to keep Persian houses cool in the summer. Centuries before the arrival of the electrically powered unit, the trusted air conditioner was the badgir, a square chimney-like structure with X-shaped internal baffles. These would catch a breeze blowing from any direction and channel it down through the tower and across a pool of water at the base, cooling the interior. Popular treat though it was, faloodeh couldn’t have been made at home because the water in the pool would never have turned to ice, but the room would have easily been kept ten, or fifteen, or maybe even twenty degrees cooler than the outside air.
I had no badgir back in the hotel room, but I didn’t need one, because it was equipped with a twenty-first century cooling contraption that pumped out air almost as cool as any badgir could have managed. And so it was a relief to stretch out beneath it at the end of the day and allow the breeze to blow over me, badgir-like. I fixed my eyes on all the craftwork and gewgaws scattered around the room and blocked out the contraption’s persistent whir, and for brief moments I could imagine the cool air descending from the tried-and-true, old-form badgir.
Later that night, neither the badgir nor the mellow humming modern unit was needed. After a trip back to the Old City for dinner at another restored bathhouse restaurant, tiled in traditional white and blue, I returned to enjoy the evening breeze in the hotel courtyard, lying on one of the cushioned takhts. The day’s heat was a memory, and it would remain so at least until the first appearance of the morning light. For now, the stars overhead sparkled in an inky desert sky. The only noise was that of the nighttime breeze stirring the fronds of the palm trees high above. Even Laurel and Hardy had quit their antics and settled into sleep. In this moment of peace, I looked into the sky and saw not the familiar outlines of Cygnus and Scorpio, Lyra and Ursa Major, but a caravan of camels bound for the East, parading across the heavenly dome.