Karaftu Cave

Karaftu is a cave high in a limestone ridge in Divandarreh County, in the north-east of Kurdistan province, near the border with West Azerbaijan. From a distance it looks like a dark opening in the cliff; up close, it turns out to be a natural cave that people have shaped over many centuries into a building of several levels, with corridors, rooms, doorways and windows cut into the rock.

The cave's most famous feature is a short Greek inscription carved above one of the doorways. It reads, in translation, “Heracles lives here; let nothing evil enter.” Heracles, the Greek hero, was widely venerated across the Hellenistic world that followed Alexander's conquests, and in Iran he was often identified with the Iranian god Verethragna, a god of victory. The inscription is generally dated to the Seleucid or Parthian period, and it suggests that part of the cave served as a shrine or a guarded refuge at that time.

Other features point to a long and varied life. Some rooms have niches, benches and channels; scholars have suggested uses as a temple, a fortress, a hermitage or a place of refuge, and the different levels may belong to different periods. Traces of earlier human presence have also been reported. The sequence has not been fully worked out.

Reaching the cave involves a climb up the slope and into the rock, and inside, the passages are dark and uneven. The reward is the strange experience of walking through rooms that are half nature and half architecture, and of reading a few words of Greek carved two thousand years ago in the mountains of Kurdistan.