Khorheh

In a quiet valley near Mahallat, in Markazi province, two stone columns stand alone in a field, topped with the scrolled Ionic capitals of Greek architecture. This is Khorheh, one of the very few places on the Iranian plateau where buildings of the Hellenistic world, the age that followed Alexander’s conquest, can still be seen standing above ground.

What the building was is still argued. The German archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld, who studied the site in the early twentieth century, first described it in 1920 as a Seleucid temple, from the period when Alexander’s successors ruled Iran, and later suggested a temple of Dionysus. Other scholars date it to the Parthian, or Arsacid, period, and some have read the remains as a palace or a manor house rather than a temple. The columns are cut from travertine, a pale stone still quarried around Mahallat today.

Khorheh has drawn curious visitors for a thousand years. A tenth-century history of Qom describes the ruin and speaks of four columns, a detail that later scholars have debated, since only two survive. Excavations around the columns have revealed foundations, column bases and fragments of a larger complex.

For a modern visitor the site is small, but it is quietly moving. The column drums and capitals, carved by craftsmen who knew the vocabulary of Greek temples, stand against the brown hills of central Iran, a reminder that the plateau was long a meeting place of Iranian, Greek and Mesopotamian traditions.