The Caspian tiger

Along the southern shore of the Caspian Sea, the Alborz catches the wet air coming off the water and grows a forest: the Hyrcanian forests, dark with ironwood, beech and oak, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Until the middle of the twentieth century this forest had tigers. Iranians still call the animal babr-e mazandarani, the tiger of Mazandaran. Its range once stretched further, through the reed beds of the great Central Asian rivers, but it was hunted, poisoned and squeezed out by farmland and drainage. The last reliable records from Iran date from around the 1950s, and the Caspian tiger is now considered extinct.

The hero's coat

Mazandaran has a second life in Persian literature. In Ferdowsi's Shahnameh (the Book of Kings), it is a land of divs, or demons, and Rostam crosses into it on his seven labours, the haft khan, to rescue a captive king. Rostam fights in a famous garment, the babr-e bayan. The phrase is usually rendered as tiger-skin, and painters of the Shahnameh gave him a striped coat, but scholars have long debated whether the babr-e bayan was a tiger, a leopard or a beast of legend. The uncertainty suits the animal: by the time the question was asked in earnest, the real tiger was almost gone.

A relative in the east

In 2009 a genetic study of museum specimens found that the Caspian tiger was very closely related to the Amur tiger of the Russian Far East, so close that the two may once have been a single population. The finding turned mourning into a question. If the Caspian tiger was, in effect, a western branch of a living animal, could tigers return to its old range? Projects in Central Asia have since begun to explore exactly that. Iran's own forests are not part of them, and for now the tiger of Mazandaran remains what it has been for seventy years: a name that outlived its animal.