Yazd Atash Behram

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The window is set low in the wall of the inner room, a pane of glass tinted the color of amber, and behind it, in a wide brass vessel raised on a stone plinth, a fire burns. A visitor who is not a Zoroastrian stops at the glass and looks through it. The flame is not large. It sits in a bed of gray ash and pale coals, fed with lengths of dry wood, and it does not flare or dance so much as hold — a steady, low, orange light that a priest tends and that no draft from the door is allowed to reach. What the glass does not show is the length of the thing behind it. The community that keeps this fire holds that it has burned without once going out since a Sasanian king is said to have kindled it around 470 CE. The temple around it was built in 1934. The flame is older than its house by nearly fifteen centuries.

The fire and its long road to Yazd

A Zoroastrian fire temple does not hold a single kind of fire. The tradition ranks its consecrated fires in three grades, and the difference between them is a difference of labor, purity, and standing. The lowest is the Atash Dadgah, the “fire of the appointed place,” a hearth-grade fire that a lay household may keep and that requires no priest to tend. Above it stands the Atash Adaran, the “fire of fires,” gathered from the hearths of several households and installed in a lesser temple under priestly care. At the summit is the Atash Bahram, the “Victorious Fire” — Bahram being the Middle Persian form of Verethragna, the yazata of victory — the highest grade a Zoroastrian community can consecrate, and the rarest. There are nine Atash Bahrams alight in the world. Eight of them burn in India — the Iranshah at Udvada, the fire at Navsari, and six more in Bombay and Surat, consecrated at intervals between 1742 and the end of the nineteenth century. The ninth, and the only one in Iran, is the fire at Yazd. To consecrate a new one is the work of many priests over the better part of a year; once lit, it is meant never to be relit, and the count of surviving Atash Bahrams is therefore also a count of unbroken keeping.

The story the Yazd community tells of its fire is a story of exile within a homeland. It begins, in the telling, at a temple called Pars Karyan in the district of Larestan, in the southern reaches of the old province of Pars, where the flame is said to have first been consecrated under a shah of the Sasanian house — the last of the great pre-Islamic Iranian empires, which ruled for four centuries from its capital at Ctesiphon on the Tigris and made the worship of Ahura Mazda the religion of its state. The date the community assigns to that kindling is about 470 CE, well before the Arab armies reached the plateau. When the Sasanian order fell to those armies in the middle of the seventh century, the fire did not fall with it. It went into hiding, and then into a slow migration across the desert interior of Iran, carried by priests from one refuge to the next as the country around them turned to Islam.

For roughly seven hundred years, by the tradition’s reckoning, the flame was kept at Aqda, a small settlement on the road between Nain and Yazd. In 1173 CE it was moved again, to the temple of Nahid-e Pars at Ardakan, at the northern edge of the Yazd plain — the same stretch of desert that holds the cliff-shrine of Chak Chak — and there, the story runs, it burned for some three centuries more. From Ardakan it came at last to Yazd itself, kept for a long stretch not in a temple at all but in the private house of a high priest, tended in a domestic room because the community had no public building grand enough, or safe enough, to hold it. Only in the twentieth century did the fire receive a house built expressly for it.

That house is the material anchor of the whole account. It was raised in 1934 — the date fixed on an inscription plaque at the shrine — with money sent from India by the Association of the Parsi Zoroastrians of Bombay, the prosperous descendants of Iranian Zoroastrians who had emigrated to Gujarat centuries before and who had long made it their charge to sustain the ancestral community they had left behind. The design was carried out under the direction of the architect Jamshid Amanat, in the Achaemenid-revival manner then favored for Iranian Zoroastrian building: a symmetrical brick structure fronted by a tall porch, its columns and cornices quoting the palaces of Persepolis, set in a walled garden of fruit trees with a circular reflecting pool before the entrance in which the whole facade stands mirrored. Above the front door, carved in relief, spreads the Faravahar — the winged human figure, hands raised, rising from a ring — the emblem most often read as a sign of Ahura Mazda or of the guardian spirit, though the identification of the ancient winged disc is itself a matter scholars still argue. To the Zoroastrians of Yazd the building was not a monument but a home finally provided for a guest who had been sheltered in borrowed rooms for generations.

The 1934 Atash Behram of Yazd, seen across its reflecting pool. Zenith210, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Why the fire is tended, and what it is not

It is easy, standing at the amber glass, to misname what one is looking at. Outsiders have for centuries called the Zoroastrians “fire-worshippers,” as though the flame in the vessel were a god receiving prayer. It is not, and the community has always said so plainly. The object of Zoroastrian devotion is Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord, the one wholly good creator, and the fire is the medium through which he is faced, not the thing that is worshipped. In the theology of the tradition, fire — Atar, the son of Ahura Mazda — is the purest and most active of the good creations, the earthly emblem of Asha: the truth, the right order of things, the cosmic and moral rightness that stands against the Druj, the Lie. To turn toward the fire in prayer is to turn toward the light of that truth. To keep the fire pure is to keep faith with it. The flame is faced, tended, and guarded; it is never an idol, and the old slur mistakes a symbol for its referent.

What raises an Atash Bahram above every other fire is the extraordinary difficulty of its making. It is not lit from a single source. It is composed — gathered, over as long as a year, from sixteen different fires drawn from across the whole range of human and natural life. Among the sixteen are the fire of a tree struck by lightning; the fire of a baker’s oven; the fires of an ironsmith, a goldsmith, and a potter at their forges and kilns; the fire of a brewer, of a shepherd’s hearth, of a mint where coin is struck, and of other trades and households besides. Even fire that has burned a human corpse is counted among the sixteen, and it is purified more stringently than any other. Each of the component fires is caught, then cleansed by kindling a fresh fire from its heat and letting the first die — a purification repeated many times over for each source, with priests reciting the sacred liturgies the prescribed number of times, before the purified fires are at last united into one. The whole undertaking demands many priests held in the strictest ritual purity throughout. The theological point of the labor is exact: the Victorious Fire concentrates and sanctifies the ordinary fires of common life — the baker’s and the smith’s and even the fire that has touched death — lifting them, cleansed, into a single flame that stands for the triumph of Asha over defilement. As a matter of the tradition’s own practice, the details of the rite are described here at the distance of the public record; the ceremonies themselves belong to the priesthood.

Once consecrated, such a fire is never allowed to die, and never allowed to be polluted. At Yazd the flame rests in its great brass vessel behind the tinted window, in an inner sanctum that only Zoroastrians may enter. The priests — the mobeds — feed it by hand with dry, sound wood, tend it through the appointed watches of the day, and keep from it everything the tradition holds must never touch a sacred element: the breath of the unpurified, the moisture of decay, the shadow of the dead. Those who are not of the faith stop at the glass. The amber tint softens the flame and sets it a little apart, a fire seen but not approached. To have carried such a fire across fifteen hundred years, through conquest and exile and the long centuries in borrowed rooms, without letting it once go out, is itself understood within the tradition as a sustained act of fidelity — a keeping of Asha measured not in doctrine but in unbroken flame. As the Encyclopaedia Iranica notes in its survey of the consecrated fire and its grades, the making and maintenance of an Atash Bahram is the most demanding of all Zoroastrian ritual undertakings, and the standing of the fire is measured by exactly that cost.

The winged Faravahar over the temple door, the emblem associated with Ahura Mazda and the guardian spirit. Bernard Gagnon, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

A living center, and a window for the world

Yazd is one of two places where the religion of Zoroaster held on. When the Arab conquest carried Islam across Iran in the seventh century, the faith of the fallen empire did not vanish but contracted, and it survived longest and most densely in the arid interior — above all in Yazd and in nearby Kerman, the twin strongholds of the old religion, where communities of the faithful persisted through centuries in which they were a taxed and often pressed minority. Some of their number left. Around the eighth to tenth centuries a body of Zoroastrians took ship for Gujarat and became, in time, the Parsis of India, carrying their own Victorious Fire into exile — the Iranshah, now kept at Udvada on the coast. Those who stayed became the Iranian Zoroastrian community of which Yazd is still the beating heart.

That community is small and it is aging. The Zoroastrians of Iran number only in the tens of thousands now, and their demographic weight is slight against the country around them. But they are emphatically present, present-tense, a living congregation and not a museum piece, and the Atash Behram is their devotional and communal center — a working temple where prayers are said and the festivals of the ritual year are kept, and a place of pilgrimage for Zoroastrians who travel to stand in the presence of a fire the community counts, by its own reckoning, at well over fifteen hundred years old. The Zoroastrians.net community weekly, reporting on the temple, described its flame as a fire “alive for 1,550 years” — a tangible thread, in the community’s understanding, running back unbroken to the Sasanian age. It is a different sanctity from the crater-lake fire of Takht-e Soleyman, long cold, or the cliff-shrine at Chak Chak: here the sacred thing is not a ruin or a legend but a flame still burning, still fed, this morning as yesterday.

For most of its history the inner life of such a temple was closed to outsiders entirely. That changed at Yazd in the 1960s, when the Anjuman-e Nasiri, the elected Zoroastrian association of the city, opened the temple to non-Zoroastrian visitors — admitting them to the outer rooms and to the window through which the fire can be seen, while keeping the sanctum itself for the faithful. The decision made the Yazd Atash Behram one of the best-known windows the wider world has onto Zoroastrianism: travelers to the city come to the glass to see the oldest continuously burning fire they will ever look upon, and to read the panels that explain the faith to which it belongs. The temple stands on Ayatollah Kashani Avenue, formerly Taleghani, a few kilometers from Yazd’s airport, within reach of the old city whose earthen quarters draw the visitors in the first place.

The 1934 building is itself a document of the bond that kept the Iranian community alive. That the money came from Bombay, that the plans were drawn in an idiom borrowed from the Achaemenid past, that the fire’s new house was a gift of the diaspora to the homeland — all of it records the long reciprocity between the Parsis who had prospered in India and the ancestral community they had never forgotten. Scholarship has followed that world closely. Mary Boyce, whose Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (London: Routledge, 1979) drew directly on a year of fieldwork among the Zoroastrian villages of the Yazd plain, gave the modern study of the living religion its foundational Anglophone account, and the Encyclopaedia Iranica remains the standard scholarly reference for the temple, the fire, and the faith around them. In 2017 the historic city of Yazd itself was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list, its wind-catchers, qanats, and earthen quarters recognized as a masterwork of desert building — and, among the reasons cited, the peaceable coexistence within its walls of Muslims, Jews, and Zoroastrians, and the fire temples and sacred sites of the last of these scattered through the old town.

A visitor who has stood at the amber glass carries away a small, exact image: not a doctrine, not a ruin, but a low orange flame in a brass bowl, fed by a hand that will not let it fail. The temple is not yet a hundred years old. The fire in it is counted in centuries the way the desert around it is counted in generations of qanat-diggers — a thing handed from keeper to keeper, on the understanding that whoever holds it holds a light that was lit long before them and is meant to be passed, still burning, to whoever comes next.

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