Iran Day 6

Day 6 - 15th November 2018




Even in the ulu-est of towns like Varzaneh, they were never short of electricity. 伊朗好多东西都没有，但是石油一大堆，电源多得是。So driving cars around was easy because oil was so abundant in Iran. And even in the simplest of rooms they would have heaters and electricity because their generators were running all the time. That was the great advantage of being an oil-producing country.


The VIDEO

Our clothes all dried up very quickly in the heated rooms and we slept warm and comfortable.



Breakfast was a cosy affair in the tiny little dining hall.

“Imagine, one barrel of oil that comes out of your sand you sell for US$60-70 now. During its peak each barrel was US$100. All you need to do is just keep producing barrel after barrel of oil and your US$60 just keeps coming in,” reiterated Ah Woo during breakfast.

Finally at this little guesthouse we utilized our cup noodles and 3-in-1 instant coffee to their fullest- making instant noodles and coffee with their hot tea. Sounded strange but paradoxically the end result tasted not bad.


Mohammad kept emphasizing to eat a huge breakfast because it was going to be a long 4 hour trip to Shiraz and we would only get to have lunch at 2pm.


So we just ate and ate.



The pigeon tower of Varzaneh



Here in Varnazeh the annual rainfall is only 80mm annually. But it must have rained last night as the grounds were all wet when we woke up in the morning. Looking afar, dark low-set cumulus clouds filled the sky.

“Looks like it may rained,” I asked Benjamin.

“Yes, I think you are right. It looks like it is going to be a cold day and we can expect rain,” he replied.

We all must be very lucky. Even in the driest of deserts, we also stumble upon rain clouds and rain. Really 有水 yah.



Before we set off for the long trip, our first stop was the little pigeon Tower (or pigeon House) of Varnazeh.



This was built during the Sasavid period 300 years ago. There were small little holes up in the tower that allowed the pigeons to fly in and live inside this tower. The pigeons would breed here and after two years the pigeon droppings would come up to 1 metre high. The breeders would come in to collect the droppings as fertilizers and to occasionally use the pigeons for food.


Predator birds found it difficult to fly in because the holes were either too small for them or even when they got in they would be confused.


At its peak, there were 16,000 pigeons living here.

The deserted ancient village of Kharanagh



The name Kharanagh came from the words Kahr, donkey and Negh, screaming. Thus the village of screaming-donkeys it was!



Only a short 80km from Yazd, this village is 4000 years old, as old as the people of Zoroastrianism here. It predated even the Persian empire of Achaemenid by Cyrus the Great in 550BC. It would have been established some time during the early Bronze Age of the Near East. During those days the religion practiced was one of the oldest (and even till today still actively practiced religion) called Zoroastrianism, a monotheistic religion characterized by Good and Evil, of Judgement on death and Heaven and Hell.


Zoroastrianism was the main religion of Iran pre-Islamic invasion. The Queen and Princesses of the last Sassanian empire escaped from Persepolis to the nearby Yazd when the Arabs invaded Iran in 630AD, refusing to be converted to the new Islamic faith. The city of Yazd was part of the ancient Aryan Silk Road, together with Sistan and Kerman.




Until just decades ago, Mohammad shared, there were still people living in this mud village, but they were shifted out of the village as the water supply dried up and they were moved to the adjacent residences.

“Wow this place is fantastic,” said a shell-shocked Kong Wan, afterward. “Who would have imagined. I’m sure it was a very buzzling area during its days!”

Fantastic was perhaps an understatement. I could spend hours just squirrelling through the alleys, beneath the archways, up and down the many short and steep twisting stairways that tunnelled up to to rooftops as well as spiralled down to the basements.


Every turn would literally bring a new angle, a new frame through which another ruin would position itself perfectly, ready for the photo-taking.


For want of sounding cliche, it was again like I was being transformed into the ancient world of those days. I was imagined as perhaps a farmer walking home at the end of the day, pulling along my mule, negotiating the narrow pavement, ready for a simple dinner of firewood-baked potatoes.

“Just come with me, Dar.” I instructed Serene. In such a setting everybody would have his or her own shots in mind the whole group would spread out like wild fire in exploring the ruins. “We go on our own way.”

A stunning young lady followed us, together with her husband. She turned out to be living somewhere near here with her farmer husband and to her, we must have been as alien-looking as she was exotically-beautiful in our eyes.


She was of a simple and quiet demeanor. But she wasn’t shy, and was so willing to pose for us, in her natural farmer innocence without expecting anything from us at all. She must have found us a strange bunch of far easterners wielding cameras and mobiles, excited like little children scampering around her home ground. David, Serene and I had a swell time taking her portraiture at the rooftop and at the stairway. Google Translate did a great job, as I was able to ask her all the questions in English and it translated into Persian and she understood me.

Her eyes genuinely brightened up and her innocent smile blossomed, when she saw her own pictures in our cameras and phones and she blurted out: “Kheli Khoob! (Very good)”

Sadly she had no Telegram, no email, no messaging for us to send her the photos. But all we knew of her was her name was Zahra, just a simple girl with her farmer Shohar (husband) as the man beside her proudly gestured, when I asked if she was his Zan (wife).



Lunch with fish!


Finally we had buffet style lunch - and a very delicious one at that- in one of the five star hotels in Yazd. And they served fish!


Kong Wan, David and I finally managed to eat fish in Iran. Though we could not tell what fish it was, it was salty enough to challenge the Chinese version of salted fish.



The $1000 Spirit of Iran prize


Adrian heart-painfully offered a $1000 prize to a photographic entry that could capture the spirit of Iran. And every day every night he was hounded by our good Serene who would jokingly show him her iPhone shots and asked for that $1000 prize...

“Don’t have first prize, second prize $800 also got right?” she teased Adrian, who could only roll his eyes.

“Lionel,” Serene now shifted subject. “My this one $1000 prize you think can right?”

Lionel: “Sure! Definitely can. You get the $1000 first and then $400 comes to me.” That’s why I say finance people are clever because they know how to do business deals.

The Tower of Silence



The Zoroastrians believed that the dead bodies were not clean and when people died, the bodies were brought to a part far away and left there and left to decompose and to be picked clean by vultures as part of the purification process before the skeletal remains were contained in an ossuary. That was the function of these Dakhmehs tower of silence.


Each village built its own building called Khayleh which was used solely by their own villagers because of difference in rituals and ceremonial practices. The workers who were there to be in charge of taking care of the corpses were known as Nesasalar and their jobs were to arrange the corpses atop the Dakhmehs in concentric circles- men on the outer ring, women in the middle ring and children in the inner ring. These Nesasalars were considered unclean as they were exposed to the dead who often were deceased by infections. Thus they were not allowed back into the city.



From Www.atlasobscura.com


“In the Zoroastrian tradition, once a body ceases to live, it can immediately be contaminated by demons and made impure. To prevent this infiltration, Zoroastrians purified the dead body by exposing it to the elements and local fowl on top of flat-topped towers in the desert called dakhmas.

According to a tradition dating back over 3,000 years, bodies were arranged on the towers in three concentric circles. Men were placed in the outer circle, women in the middle, and children in the inner-most ring. Bodies were then left until their bones were bleached by the elements and stripped by the vultures.

After the process of purification, bones were placed in ossuaries near, or inside, of the towers. Ossuaries from these rituals have been discovered from the 4th and 5th century BCE. Similar dakhmas exist just outside of Mumbai, India, as well, although the most prominent “Towers of Silence” are in Iran.

As Iran developed and urbanized, dakhmas became increasingly closer to city limits, severely curtailing their use. Since the 1970s, the use of dakhmas has been illegal in Iran, forcing orthodox Zoroastrian’s to adapt to new burial methods. Many in the Zoroastrian community have moved to burying bodies beneath concrete, to keep out all contaminants.”



It was a site of funereal atmosphere, and every Kayleh standing there was where numerous funerals were held over the centuries. Sites of death like these I usually tried not to trifle with, but to quietly walk into with the utmost of respect to the deceased and to the practice of the local religion. With care and a silent utterance of a prayer, I entered some of the dilapidated Kalylehs and Jeffrey and I started looking for frames to shoot the Dakhmehs from inside the ritual houses.


There were two Dakhmehs there- one Golestan Dakhmeh to the right, and Maneckji Dakhmeh to the left. Both solemnly stood high up on each a hill with a long flight of steps leading all the way up.



The sun started setting and the golden light lit the kaylehs and on our left, the Maneckji Dakhmeh, a good chance to shoot some old buildings in warm light.



Personally I would have loved to walk the long flight of steps up to the Dakhmeh but time constraint didn’t allow.



Dinner back in Yazd



Our hotel in Yazd was a very pleasant Fazeli Hotel with great WiFi and good (well, overzealous in fact) room-heating service. Its rooms were bigger and more comfortable. The weather was cool as we were now in the southern part of Iran although it was rainy the past few days with passing short showers. Yazd was more happening, more touristy, and at night its streets were more bustling, though of course more touristy.



Mohammad left us on this night of the 6th day to fly back to catch the second group and to start leading them for the same trip. Replacing her was another guide, a pleasant petite lady called Soheila.


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