Desert towns and Zoroaster

Yazd is southeast of Tehran about an hour’s flight and on the edge of a desert where it was part of a network of trading routes. Caravanserais and qanats and a spotlessly clean ancient mud brick old town now surrounded by a modernising concrete city. Caravanserais are two-storey motels built around a large courtyard with stables and storerooms below and sleeping quarters and services above in deep arched arcades.

Pistachio fruit

In the open country, watchtowers protect them and a big gate closed at sunset to protect against brigands. Our hotel was a renovated caravanserai. The daytime temperature at Yazd (about 600M altitude) was about 38C, dropping to a pleasant 25 at night with zero humidity. The water supply comes from qanats, underground tunnels dug by hand many centuries ago to bring snow-melt from surrounding mountains. Surface evidence of a qanat is a straight line of giant anthills about 100M apart where shafts have been dug down and then connected by the water channel; the channel descends at a steady 1-2 degrees whatever the surface topography to deliver water to towns with minimal evaporation. While the water is now pumped up for people or agriculture, housewives used to have to descend long flights of stairs to bring up their daily supply of water.

Wind tower above a pavillion

Teahouse courtyard

The old town alleys run between high walls protecting small domestic courtyards, hammams (communal bathhouses), hotels, teahouses and people’s lives from dust and sunshine. Living spaces are set down into the earth to maintain a constant temperature and ventilated by tall wind towers where convection currents generated by rising hot air creates cooling breezes down below. If the moving air is directed over small fountains, the desert air is cooled and moistened.

The isolation of Yazd has made it one of the last populations of Zoroastrians when they were escaping the Islamasization of Iran in the 7^th century or the rampages of the Mongols in the 13^th. They are an ancient monotheistic religion that believed in the sacredness of the Aryan tetrad of fire, earth, water and air.

Sacred fire

They believed in the great God Ahura Mazda with the three central tenets of think honestly, speak truth and do good. Ahura Mazda is in continual conflict with the angel of evil and it is a person’s choice to live a redemptive good life or not. The Christian concept of Satan probably derived from this duality. After death the body becomes unclean and Zoroastrians do not want to contaminate earth by burial, so the corpse was taken to remote Towers of Silence to be devoured by vultures.

Tower of silence from funeral place

Expansion of Yazd and a decline in vulture numbers has meant the bodies now have to be buried in rock-lined graves. We visited the Towers and one of their several sacred flames, kept burning by priests for 1500 years. This was the religion of the Archaemenid Persian Empire that stretched from the Indus to the Aegean, and from Egypt to the Oxus until defeated by Alexander. A group of Persians fled persecution long ago and went to Bombay, where the honesty and business sense of the Parsees made them a very rich group: they now run huge businesses such as Tata.

Yazd people were friendly, although more conservative than Tehranis. As an aside, a number of fashionable women sport plaster on their now-straight noses.