Ateshgah

A pentagonal temple raised over a natural vent, shared in turn by Zoroastrians, Hindus and Sikhs.

Fire worship reached this coast long before anything was built to house it. The structure standing today is seventeenth and eighteenth century, a pentagon of cells around a central altar, raised by merchants who travelled the Caspian trade routes and found a place where the ground was already burning.

The altar is not a stone or a statue. It is a hole in the ground, and the flame arrives on its own. Around the courtyard the cells carry inscriptions cut by people who had come a very long way to be here.