Towers of Silence, Yazd
Circular stone towers on the desert outskirts of Yazd where Zoroastrians once exposed their dead to sun and scavenger birds rather than burying or burning them.
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Share a photoHistory & haunting lore
For centuries, adherents of Zoroastrianism, one of the world's oldest continuously practiced religions, considered earth, fire, and water too sacred to be defiled by a corpse. Instead, the dead were carried to elevated dakhmas, or Towers of Silence, on hilltops outside Yazd, and laid out in concentric rings, exposing the bodies to sun and vultures in a practice known as sky burial, intended to allow the swift, purifying separation of body and soul.
The practice continued at Yazd's twin towers until it was outlawed in Iran in the 1970s amid public health concerns and urban expansion, after which Yazd's Zoroastrian community shifted to burial in concrete-lined graves nearby. The towers themselves, along with the qanat wells and abandoned support buildings at their base, still stand largely empty on the desert hills, faintly marked by the rituals once performed inside, and are now a protected heritage site associated with the broader UNESCO-listed Historic City of Yazd. They remain one of the last visible testaments to a funerary tradition once common across the Zoroastrian world.
Current site status
Open historic site; associated with UNESCO-listed Yazd