Descendants of Cyrus

by Thornton, Christopher;

  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.

  11

  Persepolis

  Shadow of an Empire

  I announce that I will respect the tradition, customs, and religions of my empire and never let any of my governors and subordinates look down on or insult them. . . . I will never let anyone oppress any others, and if it occurs I will take his or her rights back and penalize the oppressor.

  —Cyrus I, the Cyrus Cylinder

  The Shiraz-Esfahan highway, angling northeast out of Shiraz, may not be the most dramatic in Iran, but it is one of the country’s most attractive, and arguably its most important in historical terms. Cutting across the fertile plain that surrounds the city, it passes fields of wheat and orchards bursting with berries and citrus fruits. But that is not all. A large proportion of Iran’s pistachios, the country’s number-one agricultural export, come from the Fars Province, of which Shiraz is the capital. With graceful hills rising above the plain, the view from the road is reminiscent of any of the highways that cross California’s San Joaquin Valley, passing the farming towns of Manteca and Modesto before rising into the foothills of t
he Sierra Nevada Mountains.

  Sohrab and I had an early start out of Shiraz, so early that the sun, already rising above the hills, had yet to burn off the morning fog. Despite the rural beauty that lay on both sides of the highway, the glum atmosphere in the hotel’s breakfast room still hung in the air, like a fog that would not dissipate. An hour earlier I was watching the guests sip cups of coffee and tea and pick at the shells of hardboiled eggs. What stood out were the wan faces of the women all around the room, many with an abundance of makeup to counter the mandatory headscarves that covered unseen locks of hair. The faces of the women were defiantly “painted,” but without breaking the bounds of taste. The men sat hunched over the remains of their morning meal, staring into near-empty plates as they scooped up the last bits, as though attempting to squirrel themselves away from the aura of social repression that daily surrounded them. The Islamic Republic is not a happy place, is what the scene said. An Iranian academic once characterized Iran to me as “a nation held hostage.” That was the best way to describe the roomful of hotel guests—as pawns taken prisoner whose only retaliation was to exhibit more grace and dignity than their oppressors.

  The Shiraz-Esfahan highway is one of the most heavily traveled in Iran not only because it links two of the country’s major cities. Approximately thirty-five miles out of Shiraz it passes Persepolis, the ancient capital of the Achaemenid Empire, where building was begun by Cyrus the Great in the sixth century BCE and finished by his son Darius. Two centuries later it was burned and sacked by Alexander the Great, but it remains one of the most historically significant archaeological sites in the world. The plan for the morning was to pass Persepolis and head up to Pasargadae, the site of Cyrus’s first capital and the block of stone that historians generally agree to be his tomb. To add a little more smoothness to the ride, I dug into the Volvo’s door pocket, found a collection of Sarah Vaughn recordings, and slid the CD into the dashboard player. In a moment, Sarah’s silken voice drifted like an accompanying morning mist through the interior of the Volvo, and it even helped to wipe away the forlorn faces in the hotel breakfast room.