Pir-e Naraki

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Water in that country is a labor. It is carried under the desert in the long dark tunnels of the qanats, hoarded in cisterns, reckoned by the minute. Nothing on the flanks of the Tijang range gives it away for free. And yet at the foot of one dry mountain south of Yazd a spring runs clear from the stone, and the people who climb to it each summer do not read it as geology. They read it as an answer. In their telling the water broke from the rock on the day the mountain opened to take in a hunted woman — a lady of the last royal house of Iran, cornered by an army with nowhere left to run — and closed again over the place where she stood. The shrine built there is called Pir-e Naraki, for the mountain that received her.

The mountain that received her

A pir, in the usage of the Zoroastrians of Iran, is not a tomb. It is a place of pilgrimage sanctified by a holy presence — a mountain sanctuary, a spring, a high refuge in the stone — held in trust by the community and honored by a fixed yearly visit. Pir-e Naraki is one of these, and it takes its name from the mountain at whose foot it sits: Kuh-e Naraki, also called Kuh-e Tijang, in the highlands near Mehriz, some way south of the city of Yazd. The building stands deep in the heart of the range, set between two gorges the local people name Gigoon and Zanjir — the Dareh Zanjir, the “chain valley” — and hemmed by the Tijang massif on three sides, close by the village that gives the mountain its second name. Popular reckoning puts it around twenty kilometers out from the town of Mehriz, up in the folded country where the plain gives way to rock, and counts it among the oldest of the Zoroastrian shrines still standing in Iran.

It does not stand alone. The ranges that ring the Yazd plain hold a whole cluster of these mountain sanctuaries, and the great ones are told as six. The English reference tradition lists them together — the six Yazdi pirs named as Seti Pir, Pir-e Sabz, Pir-e Naraki, Pir-e Banu, Pir-e Herisht, and Pir-e Narestan. They form a devotional map laid over the desert highlands, each a memory-site of the same catastrophe and the same survival, each a hearth where a fire is kept. To move among them, pir to pir across the summer, is to trace the shape of a people that stayed on the plateau after the rest of it had changed religion — the last dense remnant of the faith of Zoroaster, gathered into the arid interior around Yazd and Kerman, where the old worship held on longest and most thickly and its holy places drew together.

The founding of Pir-e Naraki is told two ways, and the tradition keeps both. The first and far the better known is a story of flight. In the account the Yazdi Zoroastrians carry, the shrine marks the refuge of Nazbanou — Naz Banoo, held to be a daughter or a lady of the house of Yazdegerd III, the last Sasanian king of kings, who reigned from 632 until his death in the middle of the century. As the Arab conquest overran the plateau and the empire came apart around her, the story runs, Nazbanou fled the advancing army into these mountains with a companion — a handmaid in some tellings, a prince of the house in others. She went first to the mountain called Gigoon and could find no shelter there; she went on to the Tijang range, and there, with the riders closing and no way down, she raised her hands and sought the aid of Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord and wholly good creator. The mountain answered. It opened along the stone and drew her in and closed again, hiding her from the men who hunted her, and where she had vanished a spring of fresh water broke from the dry ground. A later teller, the tradition adds, slept at the place and dreamed that Nazbanou herself commanded a shrine be raised over it.

The second story is smaller and stranger, and it turns on a tree. In this telling one of the notables of Yazd — a ruler, in some versions a king — felled an ancient tree that grew near the site and cut it into pieces, and for the act was struck blind. Repenting, he vowed to make amends: he would build a sanctuary at the place and endow it with gifts, and by that atonement his sight came back to him. The shrine is his thanksgiving, the mark of a blindness undone.

Both stories, in the tradition’s own most self-aware form, are held as the community’s memory rather than as chronicle. The motif of the first — a fleeing daughter of the last king received into a mountain — is not unique to Naraki. It runs across several of the Yazd pirs, and it is fastened at Chak Chak, the holiest of them, to a different lady of the same doomed house, Nikbanou, whose name and Nazbanou’s are easily confused and must be kept apart: a different mountain, a different princess, a different spring. That the same rescue recurs from shrine to shrine is the clearest sign of what the legend is. It belongs to the sacred geography of a people’s memory of the seventh century — the shape grief took when it was laid over the older holy places — and not to the documented prosopography of the Sasanian court. The great scholar of the living tradition, Mary Boyce, who spent a year among the Zoroastrian villages of the Yazd plain in the 1960s, read the pirs in just this way: as sanctuaries older than the royal legends fastened to them, ancient sacred springs and high places that gathered to themselves, across the long centuries of defeat, a national remembrance of the last free kings. The spring came first, in that reading, and the fugitive after. The princess is the form the water’s holiness took once there was an empire to mourn.

The sign set in the stone

Inside the frame of the religion, the meaning of Pir-e Naraki is plain and it is a meaning of continuance. This is the mountain that opened to shelter the persecuted — the place where the Wise Lord answered a prayer of the last royal house and set his sign, a living spring, in dead rock. The reading it carries is that Asha, the cosmic truth and right order the whole religion is built to serve, did not fall when the empire fell. It withdrew into the hills with the people who kept it and it remained. The water that runs where none should run is the proof offered: the good creation endures, and the desert can still be answered.

At the center of the shrine building stands the second sign, and here the frame must be exact. In the middle of the room is a round hearth of stone, and in it a fire is kept and tended. The Zoroastrian does not worship that fire. He venerates Ahura Mazda through it: the flame is Atar, the divine fire, faced and fed as the visible sign of Asha and of the Lord’s light, a sacred medium and never an idol receiving prayer in its own right. Where outsiders long saw a people bowing to a burning thing and coined the slur of “fire-worship,” they mistook the sign for the thing it points to. The correction is not a modern apology; it is intrinsic to a religion whose whole force runs against taking any made or created thing for the creator. The pilgrim approaches the hearth with the distinction already understood. Before entering he takes a white cap from a basket set outside the sanctuary room and puts it on, out of reverence, and at a place appointed for it he washes his hands and his face, for purity is owed to the fire and the water alike. Then, at the hearth, he offers into the flame a little esfand — wild rue — and kondor, the frankincense whose smoke is fragrant, and murmurs his prayer as the offerings catch and rise.

The whole rite reads, within the tradition, as a renewal of a bond. The gathering at Naraki is timed to the day of Srosh — Sraosha, the yazata of the heard prayer and of ready obedience to the divine word, the power to whom petition is entrusted and by whom it is carried — and the fire and the incense and the spring together are the community’s re-affirmation, before the flame, that the covenant with the Wise Lord holds. That the good creation endures; that it moves, for all the defeat written into the founding story, toward its healing at the end of things.

There is an economy to the choice of what is burned. The rue and the frankincense are small things, cheap and portable, carried up the mountain in a pocket and given to the fire a pinch at a time; the offering is fragrance and attention rather than any costly sacrifice, and no animal is killed at the shrine. What the pilgrim brings, in the frame of the religion, is the pure thought and the clean word and the right deed the fire is trusted to witness. As one of the six, Naraki keeps its own station in a wider devotion. The pilgrim who climbs to it is on a circuit that runs from pir to pir across the Yazd highlands — to the dripping cliff of Chak Chak, holiest of them, and to the lesser sanctuaries of the plain — and each stop is at once a memory of the flight and a hearth where the keeping goes on. The shrines answer one another. Together they hold, in stone and water and flame, the whole account the community gives of how it came to be here and why it stays.

The Zoroastrian pilgrimage shrine of Pir-e Naraki, at the foot of the Tijang range near Mehriz in Yazd province. Rouygar, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The five days in Mordad

The history behind the legend is sober and it is past. The empire that had made the worship of Ahura Mazda the religion of its state, and had gathered and canonized the sacred texts, was broken by the Arab-Muslim conquest in the middle of the seventh century; Yazdegerd III died a fugitive, and his line ended. That long fall belongs to the story of the Sasanians and need not be retold at each of the places it left behind. What matters here is the aftermath the pirs inhabit: over the centuries that followed, the Zoroastrians of Iran contracted into the dry highlands of Yazd and Kerman, and it is in that contraction that the mountain sanctuaries take their place — the sacred landscape of the community that did not leave.

And Pir-e Naraki is not an archaeology. It is a working shrine, kept in the present tense. Each year, in the Persian summer month of Mordad — around the twelfth to the sixteenth, in the first half of August, with the sixteenth the principal day and the whole gathering pinned to the day of Srosh — Zoroastrians travel to Mehriz from across Iran, and from the diaspora beyond it, for a pilgrimage of about five days. (Some English-language listings loosely place it in “mid-August”; the Iranian sources give the Mordad dates, and it is those the community keeps.) The days are not only prayer. There is communal feasting; there is the honoring of the community’s own — prizes awarded to its best students, its benefactors thanked; young couples are presented to the assembled pilgrims and their engagements announced; and around the devotion runs an open festival of music and song, of cultural and artistic and sporting events, held freely and reported year on year in the national press. The shrine that receives the crowd is the same small stone room with its round hearth and its tended flame, its basket of white caps, its water for the washing of hands and face, and the spring still running at its foot.

The community that keeps all this is small now, and aging, and its own institutions record the fact without softening it. The Zoroastrians of Iran number in the tens of thousands, a slight weight against the country around them. But small is not the same as gone. The living Zoroastrian community is emphatically present, present-tense, a congregation and not a relic, and the Mordad pilgrimage to Naraki is one of the fixed points by which it gathers and knows itself. The living pir-devotions of the Yazd Zoroastrians were set on the scholarly record by Boyce — in her ethnography A Persian Stronghold of Zoroastrianism, drawn from her residence near Yazd in 1963 and 1964, and in her standard account Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices of 1979 — and her work remains the authority for how the shrines are held and honored. The site itself is described more plainly in the World Pilgrimage Guide’s survey of Zoroastrian Iran, in the heritage material assembled by K. E. Eduljee, and in the Iranian tourism and news reporting that tracks each summer’s gathering. Across all of it the dating of the Nazbanou legend to the immediate wake of the conquest stays what it is: communal memory, carried in the mouth and not in any inscription, and marked as such.

What the shrine offers, in the end, is not proof of a seventh-century rescue. It is a place where a defeat is held without being denied, and a spring that keeps running anyway. Once a year the mountain that is said to have closed on a single hunted woman opens instead to a crowd — the tread on the path, the white caps at the door, the rue and the frankincense going up from the hearth, the announcements of new marriages made where an old flight is remembered. Then the pilgrims go back down to Mehriz, and the fire is banked, and the water goes on falling from the dry stone as it has since the day, in the community’s telling, the rock first let it go.

→ Related: Atar · Verethragna · Sraosha · Fravashi · Haoma · Yazd Atash Behram · Udvada Atash Behram · Ka Ba Ye Zartosht · The Zoroastrians · The Sasanians · Gathas