The desert around Yazd holds a series of shrines called pirs, each attached to a story of a member of the last Sasanian royal family fleeing the Arab conquest and being taken into the rock. The most visited is Chak Chak, drip drip, where water seeps from the cliff above a shrine reached by a long stair, and where a princess is said to have been received by the mountain after praying for refuge. Pilgrims come in June and camp in the buildings on the slope, and Zoroastrians travel from Tehran, from India and from the diaspora for it.
The community itself is small. Iranian Zoroastrians number in the tens of thousands at most, with a reserved seat in parliament as one of the recognised minorities, and Yazd remains their principal centre alongside Tehran and Kerman. Emigration has been substantial.
Their relationship with the much larger Parsi community of India, descended from Zoroastrians who left Iran centuries earlier, is close but not simple. The two groups reckon the religious calendar differently, and the resulting dispute about which day a festival falls on has divided Zoroastrians into rival calendar parties since the eighteenth century, with a reformed solar calendar adopted by some in the twentieth. They also differ on whether a person may enter the religion from outside, an argument that matters more the smaller the community becomes.