Takht-e Soleymān

The Zoroastrian kings’ sacred fire, and Solomon’s prison for monsters

Takht-e Soleyman sits on a remote grassy plain ringed by volcanic mountains in West Azerbaijan province, near the town of Takab, midway between Urmia and Hamadan. At its heart a fortified oval platform, about 350 by 550 m, rises some 60 m above the plain, and the hill made itself: an artesian spring rich in calcium feeds a lake at the top, and the mineral water spilling over has built up the mound over the ages. Fire and water drew people here for about 2,500 years. Traces of 5th-century BC Achaemenid occupation and later Parthian settlement lie inside the walls, and the site appears on the 4th-century Peutinger map.

Under the Sasanians, whose state religion was Zoroastrianism, this was the empire's foremost sanctuary. Around the lake stood a royal palace, a temple to Anahita, goddess of the waters, and the fire temple of Adur Gushnasp, one of the three Great Fires of the realm. It was the fire of the warrior class, and Sasanian kings humbled themselves before it to take the throne. Coins of the Sasanian shahs and of the Byzantine emperor Theodosius II, who reigned from 408 to 450, have turned up in the excavations. UNESCO judges that the plan of the fire temple, the palace and the site as a whole shaped religious architecture in the Islamic period.

The sanctuary was destroyed at the end of the Sasanian era, and after the Muslim conquest in the 7th century the place took a biblical name, the Throne of Solomon. Folklore said Solomon made the pond, and that he imprisoned monsters in the crater of Zendan-e Soleyman, Solomon's Prison, an old volcano about 3 km to the west that rises some 100 m above the plain, with shrines from the first millennium BC on its summit.

In the 13th century the Mongol Ilkhan Abaqa Khan, son of Hülagü, chose the ruins for his summer and hunting palace, perhaps from about 1271, and his son Arghun finished it. Building on the old layout let the newcomers present themselves as heirs to Iran's ancient kings. The palace faces the cardinal points in Mongol fashion, with four iwans around a courtyard and the artificial lake, a domed audience hall over the old fire temple, octagonal chambers with muqarnas ceilings, and lustre tiles in the lajvardina technique showing stars, heroes, dragons and phoenixes borrowed from China. It is the only secular building of the Ilkhanid period still standing.

UNESCO listed the ensemble in July 2003, and a small museum shows finds from the site. A Sasanian town nearby has still not been excavated.