Of Knives, a Fire Temple and a Prison

First published in Options, The Edge, March 21, 2015

An adventure into regions less traveled for a warm welcome, and remnants of an ancient culture waiting to be discovered

Zanjan was the city of knives. In the lobby, the hotel displayed locally-produced knives for sale in glass cases.  There were many knife shops in the town nearby, with an assortment of hardware, from mundane kitchen knives with wooden handles to pen-knives, switchblades, cleavers, fancy knives with inlaid, shiny blades and elaborate handles surely meant for display rather than actual use.  You could have a knife made to your specifications.  In a small corner shop in town, the genial man behind the counter, with silver hair and an ample moustache was not only the shopkeeper but also the craftsman, for he made knives with the same care and pride that an artist takes in his work, and handled them with the fondness and familiarity of the master artisan.

  

From Zanjan, the road west took me over vast tracts of desolate country, to the border province of West Azerbaijan, which shared a border with Turkey.  In the seeming wilderness, I ended up in the small town of Takab, which had a population of 40,000 people and a single hotel.  The population had a large percentage of people of Kurdish provenance, and many others of Azeri or Turkish origin.  Men with magnificent moustaches wore “Turkey pants”, narrow at the ankles, billowy at the hips, and secured with a thick cloth waistband. The local shops offered the variety of anonymous, garish-coloured, inexpensive plastic commodities made in nameless factories in low-cost countries, and local curiosities – wooden walking sticks with the handles bent into question marks, the equivalent of bathing loofahs, and other locally-produced commodities for everyday use.

As a visitor, I was an instant curiosity, with locals following and those who spoke English occasionally asking where I was from, and always, being welcomed to Takab and to Iran.  It was a telling contrast between the genuine warmth and welcome of the people to the country’s almost pariah standing in the outer world’s opinion.  There were few visitors to this remote part of the country, and the locals were as curious about an outsider as I was about them.

  

I had not come to Takab from Zanjan by accident, nor was it my final destination, for in the empty, remote country in between, I had to come to peer into the distant past of this ancient land.

The country had the gently rolling swells of hills ground down by time and weather, rocky outcrops covered in a stubble of grass that clung tenaciously to the thin soil and resisted the depredations of brutal winters.  It had not always been so empty, for a little distance from Zanjan, we passed by a stout 16^th-century bridge made of brick. The modern road bypassed it, but it was intact and would have carried traffic, for its buttresses were strong and the busy river still ran under it.

There was hardly any habitation out here in this vast, empty country which rolled away into seeming eternity.  Where the rolling hills were higher in the distance, there were pale patches of snow. 

  

The road climbed gradually, past 2000 meters above sea level, and still there was the vast emptiness of the country echoing into the distance.  The road wound on and on, but there was little traffic, save for the occasional truck.  As we climbed, streaks of snow on the hills became more frequent, and then there were banks of sparkling snow in the lee of the hills.  I saw something moving on a snowy hillside.  It was a fox, sniffing the ground.

Up ahead, there was a herd of black sheep, and we stopped.  The sky was clear, and the air was so crisp it could have cracked.  I stepped off the road onto a hillside.  The ground was soft, and there was white, smooth snow just up the slope.  There was the sparkle of running water, a thin sheet of icy snowmelt, running in a shallow depression in the ground, and white flowers without any leaves springing from the earth.

There was a shepherd with the flock of sheep, and he was friendly in the way so many rural people are, stopping by to good-naturedly pose for photographs. In the distance, the mountains rose to forbidding, snow-covered heights.  Had it always been this pristine, hundreds of years ago, in this high country?

We resumed our journey, travelling a short distance into that magical landscape of hills streaked by snow, with flowers in the valleys and braids of running water catching the sunlight.  The driver tapped me on the shoulder and pointed out to a hillside, where there was a low ruin of stacked rocks.

We drove off the road onto an unsurfaced track that led to an almost empty car parking lot.  There was a stone plaque inscribed with the UNESCO logo and the legend of Takht-e-Soleyman, the Throne of Solomon.  This was the reason that I had undertaken the journey from the City of Knives into this thinly-populated, starkly beautiful country.

The air was cold and sharp, beneath a blue sky and limitless visibility. The walkway led from the car parking lot towards the stone ramparts.  It was the remnants of what had been a walled fortress. Part of it had been rebuilt, pale interlocking stones forming a solid wall that had ringed the site. 

There was a stream of water from within the stone wall running in a drain alongside the walkway. The paved path led past a gate in the walled compound, and up a little rise. At the top, the snowy mountains encircled the citadel, but what was truly startling was the lake of shimmering green water encompassed within a roughly circular perimeter. The walls of the lake looked calcified, as if they had been built up over millennia from water deposits.  Clear water flowed out from the enclosure through small channels in the encircling perimeter.  The lake was an emerald green, with not a single feature to hint of its depth. 

Around the far periphery of the lake were ruins of buildings, buttressed by modern scaffolding.  The setting of this strange lake at the top of the rise, with the mountains flowing away into the distance, imbued the place with an elemental starkness.

This was an ancient Zoroastrian water temple, one of the most important sanctuaries of that religion.  The ruined buildings were a complex that had once been a Fire temple with its surrounding palaces, dwellings and accommodation for pilgrims.  Here was Fire and Water – purifying elements sacred to the Zoroastrians.

Destroyed by marauding Byzantine armies and later falling into disuse, the site still evoked a sense of awe and a reverential silence in the pristine surroundings.  There was only the muteness of stone ruins to tell of the holiness of this place, yet it held the memory where an eternal flame had once burned, beside a sacrosanct green lake, over two and a half thousand years ago.

I walked around the lake, probably fed by natural springs deep below.  There was a view of the surrounding countryside. A short distance away was a village, and beyond that, a conical hill with what appeared to be a walled enclosure.

There were a couple of Zoroastrian matrons visiting the site; we exchanged pleasantries, and later their son approached us and invited us to join them for lunch, but we were headed towards the odd conical hill.

At first I thought it was a Tower of Silence, which Zoroastrians once used to dispose of their dead by exposing them to the elements and birds which are carrion-feeders, but as I would soon learn, this was not the case.

We left Takht-e-Soleyman behind us, its broken walls disguising the strange lake within, and drove a few km to the cone, which was ominously called Zendane-e-Soleyman – Solomon’s Prison.

It towered into the pristine blue sky, and I started to hike up, with the spry 60-year ticket seller bounding upward like a mountain goat.  Halfway up, there were the remnants of stone dwellings, for people had once lived here, thousands of years ago.  As I approached the summit, I saw that the walled enclosure was a natural formation of rock, laid in layers so as to resemble a man-made wall.  

The ticket seller was already at the top, and summoned me over to the wall. I approached it and looked over, and had a shock, for I looked into a huge hole with vertical sides, so deep that I couldn’t initially see bottom. The hole was immense, being some 65 meters across, plunging to a shadowy depth some 80 meters down.  I understood why it was called Solomon’s Prison, for the legend was that monsters were imprisoned here, from which there was no escape. From the outside, there was no hint of this massive hole in the earth. Peering over, it was like looking into the maw of the earth, a monstrous secret hidden from the outside world.

  

Centuries, perhaps millennia ago, this vast caldera had been filled with water fed by springs within. It must have resembled Takht-e-Soleyman, and it gave an idea of the immense depth of that water-filled caldera.

  

Disused, but still sacred to the Zoroastrians, Takht-e-Soleyman and Zendane Soleyman were ancient artifacts of a once-vibrant religion whose temples with their eternal flames still burn in some cities in Iran, and whose diaspora include the Parsis of India.

Ringed by the mountains carved out by nature and time, I felt the links with an ancient religion, people who once lived and worshipped here, and whose belief in the sacredness of the primal forces of nature resonated over the millennia.  I left for Takab, but in my mind’s eye, an emerald green lake surrounded by ruins and mountains, and a volcanic caldera with an enormous hole in it, continued to haunt my memory for a long time to come.