Siyavash and the trial by fire

Siyavash is the son of Kay Kavus, the same rash king Rostam rescued from Mazandaran. In Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, the boy is raised away from court by Rostam in Zabolestan, and returns a young man of great beauty and greater integrity. His stepmother, Sudabeh, falls in love with him. He refuses her. Humiliated, she accuses him of trying to seduce her. Kavus cannot decide whom to believe, and the priests propose an ordeal. Two vast mountains of wood are built with a narrow path between, and set alight. Siyavash, dressed in white, rides his black horse into the flames before the whole city. For a moment he disappears. Then he rides out the far side, unharmed. Innocence, in this poem, is something you can see.

Vindicated, Siyavash leads an army against Turan and wins. Afrasiyab, the Turanian king, sues for peace and sends hostages. Siyavash agrees. But his father orders him to break the treaty and send the hostages to be killed. Siyavash will not break his word. He refuses, and, unable to go home, crosses into Turan itself.

Afrasiyab receives him warmly. Siyavash marries Afrasiyab's daughter Farangis, and also Jarireh, daughter of the wise counsellor Piran. He builds a beautiful city, Siyavashgerd. But Afrasiyab's brother Garsivaz poisons the king's mind with jealousy, and in the end Siyavash is put to death. In the Shahnameh, a plant springs from the ground where his blood fell. Farangis is carrying his son, Kay Khosrow, who will return to Iran and, with Rostam, avenge him.

Why it still matters

Siyavash is the Iranian archetype of the innocent who suffers. In Bukhara, the tenth-century historian Narshakhi recorded songs of mourning for Siyavash that the people sang, and scholars have long connected them with older rites of lament in Central Asia. The red resin known in Persian as khun-e siyavashan, "the blood of Siyavash", takes its name from the story. In 1969 Simin Daneshvar published Savushun, a novel named after the mourning ritual for Siyavash and widely regarded as one of the best-known Persian novels of the twentieth century. Its hero, too, is a principled man who will not bend.