Yazd Atash Behram

The fire temple of Yazd houses an Atash Behram, “victorious fire”, the highest grade of sacred fire in Zoroastrianism, made by combining fires from many sources. Zoroastrians in Yazd say this fire has burned without interruption for more than fifteen centuries, carried from place to place before being brought into the city. The building that now shelters it is modern: it was completed in 1934, funded largely by the Parsi Zoroastrian community of India.

The temple stands in a garden behind a pool. Its portico has stone columns, and over the entrance is the faravahar, the winged figure that has become the best-known emblem of Zoroastrianism. The architecture is restrained and borrows from Achaemenid motifs, part of a wider early-twentieth-century revival of ancient Iranian forms.

Inside, visitors who are not Zoroastrian can look into the sanctuary through a glass window, where the fire burns in a large metal vessel, tended by priests who feed it with wood. Yazd has long been the heart of Iran's Zoroastrian community, and a visit here pairs naturally with the hilltop dakhmeh, the so-called towers of silence, on the city's edge, where the dead were once exposed until the practice ended in the twentieth century.