The Zoroastrian kings’ sacred fire, and Solomon’s prison for monsters
On a grassy plain ringed by volcanic mountains in northwest Iran, a walled citadel stands on a hill its own spring built: a calcium-rich pond in the middle has laid down the mound it sits on. Here the Sasanian kings kept Adur Gushnasp, one of the three Great Fires of their Zoroastrian empire, the fire of the warrior class, before which a new shah humbled himself to take the throne. After the Muslim conquest the place took a biblical name, the Throne of Solomon, and stories came with it: Solomon made the pond, and he imprisoned monsters in the crater nearby, a hole 100 metres deep called Zendan-e Soleyman, Solomon’s Prison. In the 13th century the Mongol Ilkhan Abaqa Khan built a summer palace over the ruins of the fire temple, partly to borrow the old kings’ legitimacy. Achaemenid and Parthian traces lie beneath, and coins of the Byzantine emperor Theodosius II have turned up. A UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2003.
Takab, West Azerbaijan, Iran
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