The Towers of Silence, Yazd

The Zoroastrian treatment of the dead follows rigorously from doctrine, and the practice has now been abandoned in Iran for reasons that are partly doctrinal and partly ecological.

The reasoning

A corpse is nasu, the most polluting thing there is, the point at which the hostile spirit is most present.

Earth, water and fire are all sacred creations. Therefore:

• The body may not be buried, which would defile the earth.
• It may not be cremated, which would defile fire, the gravest possible offence.
• It may not be put in water.

What remains is exposure. The body is laid on stone, open to the sky, and stripped by vultures, which is rapid, and which returns the body to the world without contaminating any sacred element.

The dakhma, tower of silence, is a circular stone structure, roofless, with the surface divided into three concentric rings for men, women and children. Bones, dried and bleached, were gathered afterwards into a central pit, the astodan.

The design solves the problem exactly. Nothing touches soil, no wood burns, and there is no run-off.

Yazd

Two towers stand on hills outside Yazd, with a complex of buildings at their feet where the dead were prepared and where mourners stayed.

They are empty now, and visited as a monument.

The end of the practice

They went out of use when the city of Yazd asked for their closure in 1974.

That is a municipal request rather than a simple national ban, and the practice had been declining for decades before it for several converging reasons:

• The city had spread out to surround the hills, so towers once remote were now overlooked by houses.
• Medical schools sought bodies, and the state had views about public health.
• Many Iranian Zoroastrians had themselves come to regard exposure as outdated and were uncomfortable defending it.

What replaced it

Iranian Zoroastrians now bury their dead, near Tehran and elsewhere, in graves lined with stone and sealed with cement, so that the body does not touch the earth.

The purity rule is preserved; the method is abandoned. It is a neat instance of a tradition holding the principle constant and changing the practice that expressed it.

India, and the vultures

At Doongerwadi in Mumbai the towers remain in use, and there the crisis is ecological rather than doctrinal.

The Indian vulture population collapsed by more than ninety-seven per cent by 2008, poisoned by diclofenac, a veterinary anti-inflammatory given to livestock and lethal to the birds that fed on the carcasses. Three species went from tens of millions to near-extinction in about a decade.

Without vultures, bodies do not decompose as the system requires. Solar concentrators were installed to accelerate desiccation, and captive breeding has been attempted. Neither works as well as vultures did, and the question has divided the Parsi community bitterly, between those who regard exposure as non-negotiable and those who favour burial or cremation.

A religious practice was ended in one country by urban growth and public health, and is failing in another because of a painkiller given to cattle.

The Towers of Silence were built with concentric rings inside them, a deliberate physical sorting of the dead that reflected who they had been in life.

A structure organised by category

Inside each circular tower, the deceased were traditionally arranged in three concentric rings, one each for men, women and children, with vultures left to reduce the remains through excarnation before the residual bones were collected into a central pit, a specific spatial arrangement built directly into the towers' physical design rather than an informal custom.

Why earth and fire were kept apart from death

Zoroastrian theology treats a corpse as a source of ritual pollution, associated with Nasu, a demon of decay and impurity, and holds that burying or cremating a body would contaminate the sacred elements of earth and fire respectively, reasoning that made exposure on an elevated structure, open to the sky and scavenging birds, the least polluting option available under strict traditional interpretation.

As this entry's companion article covers

The practical decline of the practice, driven by vulture population collapse, urban expansion around the towers and legal restrictions, along with the community's shift toward concrete-lined burial as this entry's companion article describes, marks the end of active use of these specific structures even as their physical form remains preserved as a historical site.