Secrets of the Zoroastrian Tower of Silence
By Sadeq Dehqan
Staff writer
A mountain called Kooh-e Dakhmeh, or Tower of Silence, is located 5km southeast of Yazd, the capital city of the central province of Yazd. The word ‘dakhmeh’ literally means cave, or sometimes, a dark and/or damp place.
Two dakhmehs are located on the highland, in which the ancient residents of the region placed their dead. They believed that earth, water, and fire are sacred elements, which should not be polluted with corpses, thus they transferred their dead outside of their cities.
They left the corpses for vultures and other birds to feed on them and, after some time, they collected and dumped the bones in an ossuary.
Fariborz Shahdadi, head of the Yazd Zoroastrian priests (mobeds) believes that such a custom was followed by the early Aryan settlers of the region; it has no connection with the basic religious rituals of Zoroastrians.
People who lived in Iran Vij, an early Aryan settlement located in the northern, cold region of the country, used this method, but it was not common in most other parts of the country.
After the reign of the Sassanid king, Khosrow Parviz, various religions entered Iran, and their followers gradually called themselves Zoroastrians. They took advantage of the weakness of the Zoroastrian clergy to promote some ideas; for example, in some areas they said that dakhmehs should be built for the dead, while there was no such tradition in Zoroastrian culture.
He said most of the Zoroastrians’ pilgrimages and holy places in Yazd were built on highlands in the heart of mountains, adding, Zoroastrians carried their dead to the top of the mountains. To reach the dakhmehs, you had to climb the mountain slopes through the stairs.
The stone structure of the staircase shows that its age is not as old as the dakhmehs, and for many years the people had to climb the mountain to reach them.
Shahzadi added that some strong men called nesasalar carried the corpses up to the Tower of Silence by themselves.
The ritual has not been performed for more than half a century, while Zoroastrians, like followers of many other religions, bury the bodies of their dead.
Shahzadi noted that the Zoroastrian religion called for its followers to act according to the norm in cases which are not considered among the principles of the religion.
“Since the tradition of placing the dead in dakhmeh is not a religious principle, Zoroastrians, like Muslims and their Iranian predecessors, bury their dead in the earth,” he concluded.