Chak Chak

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The road north from Yazd runs out into a gravel plain the color of ash, then climbs toward a wall of bare brown mountains. There is nothing soft in the landscape and nothing growing. Then, where the cliff rises sheerest, a stair of stone steps zigzags up the rock face to a terrace high above the plain, and at the top of the climb a pair of great brass doors stands shut against the stone. Behind them is a cave, its walls black with the soot of fires that have burned in it for as long as anyone has counted. Water seeps from the rock of the cave’s ceiling and falls, drop after slow drop, into the dark. The sound it makes — chak, chak — has given the place its name.

This is Pir-e Sabz, “the Green Shrine,” the holiest of the mountain sanctuaries of the Zoroastrians of Iran. It sits in the desert east of Ardakan, at the northeastern edge of the plain of Yazd, in the central Iranian plateau that became, after the fall of the old empire, the last redoubt of the religion of Zoroaster. To the people who climb to it each summer, the cave is not merely old. It is the place where the mountain opened to take in a fleeing princess, and where it has wept for her ever since.

The mountain that opened

The story that gives Chak Chak its meaning belongs to the seventh century, to the years when the Sasanian empire — the last of the great pre-Islamic Iranian states, ruled for four centuries from Ctesiphon on the Tigris — came apart under the armies of the Arab conquest. Its last king was Yazdegerd III, who came to a contested throne as a boy around 632 and spent his reign in flight. After the catastrophe at al-Qadisiyya and the loss of the capital, he moved eastward from province to province, raising armies that dissolved before they could fight, until in 651 he was killed near Merv, far out on the empire’s eastern edge — murdered, the historians say, by a miller in whose mill he had taken shelter. With his death the empire of four hundred years was finished. The factual record of that collapse is firm; the dates and the king are not in doubt.

What the record does not contain is any mention of what the tradition holds happened at this cliff. In the telling kept by the Zoroastrians of Yazd, one of Yazdegerd’s daughters — she is called Nikbanou — fled the advancing Arab cavalry into these mountains. Cornered at last against the rock, with the riders closing and no way down, she raised her hands and prayed to Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord, to be spared capture. And the mountain answered. The cliff opened along a seam in the stone and drew her in, closing again over the place where she had stood, hiding her forever from the men who hunted her. The cave is the door through which she passed. The spring that drips from its ceiling is the mountain’s grief — the rock weeping, drop by endless drop, for the princess it took in and cannot give back.

The shrine complex set into the cliff face above the plain of Yazd. — Arteen Arakel Lalabekyan, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Nikbanou is not alone in the legend. She belongs to a whole family of fugitives scattered through a whole family of shrines. The mountains around the Yazd plain hold a cluster of these sanctuaries, the pirs — six of them counted as the great ones — and the stories attach to nearly all of them a member of the doomed royal house, run to ground and saved by being taken into the earth or the rock. A second daughter gives her name to Pir-e Banu-Pars, “the Lady of Pars,” whose shrine stands in the mountains at the plain’s northern end. Another sanctuary, Seti Pir, marks where the queen is said to have leapt with her attendants into a deep well; another, Pir-e Herisht, remembers a faithful handmaid. These are aetiologies — explanations grown up after the fact to account for places already holy. Scholars of the religion, the foremost of them Mary Boyce, who spent a year in the Yazd villages in the 1960s and wrote the standard account of the pir shrines, read the shrines as far older than the legends fastened to them: pre-Sasanian sacred springs and high places, sanctified by water or by stone, that gathered to themselves, in the centuries of defeat and pressure, a national memory of the last kings and the last free days. The princesses are the form the grief took. The springs were there before them.

What the cave holds

To stand inside the cave is to stand in the religion’s oldest grammar. Three things are present in it together — fire, water, the green tree growing from dead rock — and each is a thing the tradition has always held sacred.

The fire is the heart of it. Zoroastrian worship is oriented to fire as the visible sign of the Wise Lord’s truth and light, the atar before which the faithful pray, and the walls of the Chak Chak cave are black with the soot of the fires kept burning there. The brass doors that close the sanctuary are modern, embossed in an Achaemenid manner with the figure of the prophet, but what they guard is ancient in kind: a flame tended in a high place, fed and kept alight by the people who climb to it. Behind the doors the floor is laid with marble, the only worked surface in a chamber otherwise raw stone.

The modern gates of the shrine, in an Achaemenid-revival style. — Philippe Chavin (Simorg), via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The water is the second sacred element, and at Chak Chak it is the strange one. In the dry heart of a desert range, where the surrounding stone yields nothing, water seeps from the roof of the cave and falls steadily into the dark. By the religion’s own reckoning water is holy — the element guarded, in the old cosmology, by the divine being Aredvi Sura Anahita, the lady of the waters — and a spring that runs in such a place, against all the evidence of the surrounding rock, is read as no accident of geology. It is the princess’s element, given for her sake. The dripping is her keeping. And because the water falls drop by separate drop rather than running in a stream, it makes a sound, and the sound is the shrine’s name: chak chak, “drip drip.” The place is named for the noise of mourning.

The third thing is the tree. From a crack in the bare cliff, fed by the seeping water, grows an ancient plane — a chenar — and around it myrtle and mountain figs and other green things that have no business on a desert rock face. The tradition holds the tree to have sprung from the staff, the walking-cane, that Nikbanou carried and set into the stone; it took root where she vanished and has stood ever since. This is why the shrine is the Green Shrine, Pir-e Sabz: green is the impossible color here, the color that cannot be and yet is, the living sign left at the place of disappearance. A scholar would note that springs make oases and oases make trees, and that the green came first and the staff after. Inside the frame, the order runs the other way. The princess set down her staff, and the desert turned green for grief.

The sanctuary built against the rock face. — Elnaz, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

For the Zoroastrians of Iran — a people who held the plateau for a thousand years and then, after the conquest, became a shrinking minority paying the poll-tax under one dynasty after another, hemmed by restrictions on their dress and their building and their movement — the cave is more than a relic of a sad story. It is the place where the defeat is held and transfigured. The empire fell; the king was murdered in a stranger’s mill; the daughters were hunted through the mountains. But the mountain took them in. The faith was not, in the telling, captured with the empire. It went into the rock and kept burning there, a fire in a cave above a dead plain, waiting.

The climb

What keeps Chak Chak alive is not the legend by itself but the journey made to it, year on year, by people for whom the climb is an act of belonging. Each June — for several days in the middle of the month, traditionally reckoned around the fourteenth to the eighteenth — Zoroastrians converge on the shrine from across Iran and from much farther: from Tehran, now the largest of the Iranian communities; from Yazd and Kerman, the old heartland; and from the diaspora, above all from the Parsis of India, descendants of the Zoroastrians who left this same plateau by sea after the conquest and built a new community on the western coast of India. The mid-June pilgrimage to Pir-e Sabz has become, in Mary Boyce’s phrase and in the practice since, something like a national gathering — the one fixed point to which a scattered people returns.

The approach has its own discipline, kept with care. The old custom holds that a pilgrim, on first catching sight of the shrine in its cliff, must dismount and go the rest of the way on foot; the last stretch of the journey to the holy place is made walking, not riding. The hundreds of stone steps up the cliff are climbed in the heat, and the ground near the sanctuary is treated as holy ground, approached unshod, in cleanliness, in white. White is the color of the religion’s purity, the color of the sudreh, the sacred undergarment that every initiated Zoroastrian wears against the skin; pilgrims come to the shrine in white, and the white against the brown rock is part of the sight of the festival. At the top, candles and oil lamps are lit before the fire, in the conviction that fire is the light of the divine and that to kindle a flame is to set one’s good thought beside it — humata, hukhta, hvarshta, good thoughts, good words, good deeds, the threefold motto of the faith. No animal is killed at the shrine; the old festival sacrifices of the Iranian Zoroastrians fell away through the twentieth century, and the modern observance is bloodless. People pray, tend the fire, eat together on the terrace, and come down again.

The sanctuary that receives them is, in its built form, largely a modern making. The cave and the spring and the tree are old beyond dating, but the marble floor, the lodging-rooms terraced down the cliff to shelter the pilgrims, the brass doors with their Achaemenid prophet, the very accessibility of the steep approach — these are works of the twentieth century, paid for by a community grown prosperous in Tehran and Bombay and resolved to keep its holiest place fit for the crowds that come to it. Observers of the modern pilgrimage have noticed how closely its forms echo the Shia shrine-visiting all around it in Iran — the ziarat to the tomb-shrines of the imamzadeh, the descendants of the Imams, scattered across the same landscape. The Zoroastrian pir and the Muslim imamzadeh sit in the same country and draw on the same vocabulary of the holy: a journey to a saint’s resting place, a fugitive of sacred blood saved or martyred, a spring or a tomb that answers prayer. The resemblance is not borrowing in one direction only. It is the shared shape that pilgrimage takes in this land, worn by every faith that has lived in it.

The afterlife of a vanishing

There is an irony folded into the shrine that the tradition lives with rather than resolves. The Zoroastrian story of Yazdegerd’s daughter taken into the rock has a near-twin in the Shia devotion of the same country: the legend, widely told, that another daughter of the last Sasanian king — called Shahrbanu, “Lady of the Land” — was carried captive to Medina and there married to Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet and the great martyr of Shia Islam, so that the line of the Imams runs back through her into the blood of the Persian kings. The historical record knows of no such daughter; the marriage is legend, as the opening of the mountain is legend. But the two stories do the same work from opposite sides. Both take the trauma of the conquest — the end of the kings, the breaking of the old order — and convert it into a sacred genealogy, a way for the defeated past to flow on into the surviving present. One daughter founds the line of the Imams. The other becomes the spring weeping in the cave. The conquest produced both.

For the Zoroastrians, the cave’s meaning has only sharpened as the community has shrunk. The Iranian census counted some twenty-three thousand Zoroastrians in 2016; worldwide the faith numbers perhaps somewhere above a hundred thousand, divided mainly between Iran and the Indian Parsis, both communities in long demographic decline, both anxious over conversion and intermarriage and the simple arithmetic of more deaths than births. Against that arithmetic the June pilgrimage stands as a counting of another kind — a yearly muster on a cliff, a demonstration that the people still exist and still climb. The fire in the cave is small and the desert around it is vast. The water keeps falling. The plane tree, green where nothing green should be, holds to its crack in the rock; and the pilgrims come up the steps in white to set their candles beside the flame and listen, in the dark of the sanctuary, to the slow patient sound for which the mountain is named.

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