Place · Zoroastrian fire temple · India
Udvada Atash Behram
The Zoroastrian fire-temple at Udvada in Valsad district, Gujarat, housing the Iranshah atash behram — the highest-grade Parsi sacred fire, said to have been carried from Iran to Gujarat around 721 CE after the Parsi flight from Umayyad persecution. Tradition holds the fire has burned continuously for over 1,250 years through several relocations: Sanjan (where it arrived), Bahrot caves (during Alauddin Khilji's 1297 raid), Vansda, Navsari (1419-1741), and Udvada since 1742. The present fire-temple was built in 1894 by Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy and the Wadia family. Non-Parsis are not permitted to enter the inner shrine. Udvada's Parsi community has shrunk to about 100 families as the national Parsi population declines below 60,000.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 20.490, 72.870
Connections (2)
- Monument relocationSanjan
The Iranshah fire was consecrated at Sanjan, and when Sultanate raids reached the coast in the fourteenth century the priests carried it into the Bahrot caves and kept it burning there for twelve years, then at Bansda, then at Navsari for nearly three centuries, and finally to Udvada in 1742. A fire that cannot be allowed to go out has been carried the length of a coastline to keep that condition.
- Scriptural inclusion inThe Avesta
The Avesta's surviving custody is Indian. When Zoroastrian refugees reached Gujarat the texts came with them, and the fire at Udvada — the Iranshah, held to have been carried from Sanjan and kept burning since — is the institutional centre of that continuity. Much of what survives of the Avesta survives because Parsi priests in India copied and recited it after the tradition contracted in Iran, and the nineteenth-century European reconstruction of Avestan grammar was done largely from Indian manuscripts.
On these journeys
Sources
Parsi community records
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