A Founding Place That Cannot Be Visited

The Siyah Chal no longer stands. The structure was cleared long ago and the ground is built over, so there is no shrine, no marker and no fabric to preserve. That absence is compounded by a second one. Baha'i pilgrimage in Iran is not possible, because the Baha'i community there is not recognised and its members face restrictions that the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran has repeatedly documented, including restrictions bearing on property, education, employment and burial. The atlas records this as reported by the United Nations mechanism established to report on it, and does not go beyond what that reporting establishes. The consequence for the faith is that its geography is displaced.

Baha'i pilgrimage is directed instead to Haifa and Acre, and the country in which the religion began, in which both of its central figures were born, and in which a substantial Baha'i population still lives, holds no accessible Baha'i place of pilgrimage at all. The Siyah Chal is the sharpest instance of that. It is a founding place known only through the written accounts of the man who was imprisoned in it, with no site to visit and no community in a position to maintain one.