Noruz with kings

Nou Ruz, New Light, the spring equinox, the twenty-first of March, or the first day of the month of Farvardin archangel, New Year’s Day in the Persian calendar. For weeks before it, three kings, singers dressed as Zoroastrian priests or painted as black men go about the bazaars, and wish good luck with New Year’s songs to the merchants and to everyone who rewards it with a few coins. They also brought good luck to me, because although the camera was not set to autofocus, nevertheless the gloom does not destroy the video, but rather makes it mystical. Near the middle, when they get closer, the picture will be sharper, and as they move away, the view gets gradually blurred, as if they were absorbed in the vibrant lights of the bazaar.


Two thousand five hundred years ago on this morning, King Darius and his descendants, surrounded by their nobility and priests, stood in the eastern gate of the Apadana, the royal reception hall of Persepolis, to greet the first ray of the rising sun, and then receive the envoys of the twenty-one provinces. The envoys are still lined up, carved in stone, on the eastern stairway, where they walked up, and on the northern stairway, where they left the royal hall. We go up to the palace at the best time, at five in the afternoon, to see, how the sunset paints them, how it calls them to life for an hour, every day, since two thousand five hundred years.

The gift-bearing of Persepolis became so emblematic in Persian culture, that even Marcell Mauss’ classical anthropological work, The Gift is illustrated by a Persepolis envoy in the Persian translation.


Just like the visit paid to the king on this day. There is no king in Persepolis now, since Alexander the Great and his chief commanders set fire to Xerxes’ palace on that drunken night. On this day, the people of Iran proceeds to the tomb of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the country. A colorful crowd is waving around the simple and majestic tomb that emerges alone in the plain of Pasargade. Medes from Hamadan, Kurds and Bakhtiari nomads from the Zagros mountains, Azeris and Khuzestanis, Armenians and Baludzhis, taking photos of each other and with each other, marveling at each other and at the greatness of the Persian empire. They also receive with self-evidence and joy the envoys of Europe, the heirs of Athens, who, after so many centuries, have finally come to a better understanding, and came to pay their tribute to the great king of Persia.