Yazd

Zoroastrian fires are graded, and the highest grade, the Atash Behram, is consecrated from sixteen different sources of fire in a process taking a year or more. Yazd holds one, and the community states that this fire has been kept burning continuously for many centuries, moved from place to place before being installed in its present temple in the twentieth century. It is tended by priests who cover the mouth and nose with a cloth so that breath does not pollute it, and fed with dry sandalwood at fixed times. Visitors see it through glass; the fire is not worshipped but treated as the purest visible sign of the divine.

The city kept the largest Zoroastrian population in Iran through the centuries of Muslim rule, in which the community held the status of a protected minority and paid the poll tax, under conditions that varied from tolerable to severe. The tax was lifted in 1882 after sustained pressure, including from Parsi philanthropy in India.

Outside the city stand two dakhmas, the round walled enclosures on hilltops where the dead were laid out for birds, so that a corpse, the most polluting thing there is, would not defile earth, water or fire. Exposure was ended in Iran in the 1970s under public health law, and burial in concrete lined graves replaced it. The towers are empty now and open to visitors, while the Parsi community in Mumbai continues the practice under increasing difficulty as vulture populations collapse.

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.