Towers of Silence in Yazd

Two round structures on the bare hills to the south of the city — Zoroastrian dakhmas, where until the middle of the twentieth century the dead were exposed. According to Zoroastrian belief, earth, water and fire are sacred and must not be defiled by a dead body, so it was left on an open platform inside a ring wall, where the birds dealt with it. The bones were placed in a central well. Inside, the platform is divided into three belts: the outer one for men, the middle one for women, the inner one for children. The rite was banned in the 1970s, and since then the community has been allowed to bury its dead in concrete-lined graves in the cemetery at the foot of the hill. Yazd remains the main Zoroastrian centre of Iran, and the temple fire of Ateshkadeh burns here too, kept alight, according to tradition, for a millennium and a half. At the foot of the hills the service buildings have survived: a cistern, rooms for ritual washing and kitchens for the funeral meals.

On the map