Kuh-e Khwaja

The Shahnameh gives Rostam no single castle with a name you can find on a map. But in Sistan, legend has always pointed to one place: Kuh-e Khwaja, a flat-topped mesa of black basalt that rises from the bed of Lake Hamun, south-west of Zabol. When the lake is full the hill becomes an island. The brick ruins on its slope, a fortified palace with courtyards and a temple, are called by local people Qal'eh-ye Rostam, Rostam's castle, as well as Qal'eh-ye Kafaran and Kohan Dezh.

The ruins are real and important. The oldest buildings appear to date from the Parthian period, with later Sasanian work. In the early twentieth century the explorer Aurel Stein and the archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld recorded wall paintings here, some of the few surviving examples of Parthian and Sasanian painting, now divided between museums in Delhi, Berlin and elsewhere. Scholars have suggested the complex was an important Zoroastrian sanctuary.

A sacred lake

The site is sacred in more than one tradition. Zoroastrian texts tell that the seed of Zoroaster is kept in a lake in Sistan, identified with the Hamun, from which the world's saviour will be born at the end of time. On the summit stands the shrine of a Muslim holy man, Khwaja Ghaltan, from whom the hill takes its modern name, and people from across Sistan visit it during Nowruz. A hill in a lake, sacred to Zoroastrians and Muslims and remembered as a hero's fortress, is a fair summary of how the epic lives in the Iranian landscape. The connection to Rostam is legend, not archaeology.