Posts tagged : "History"

Kourosh Ziabari - The New Arab: UNESCO World Heritage Sites are natural areas and cultural, man-made structures judged to be outstandingly paramount to humanity, designated by the United Nations’ cultural agency as landmarks that merit international attention and conservation at home. Iran, however, as isolated and cornered as it might be these days, hosts 26 such properties dotted across the country, and is the world’s 10th country in terms of the frequency of World Heritage Sites. The last Iranian monument to be inscribed on the World Heritage Sites inventory in 2021 is the cultural landscape of Hawraman. Encompassing an extensive area in Western Iran, spanning the provinces of Kurdistan and Kermanshah, Hawraman is a...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Armenia has suffered the wounds of abiding traumas over its history that still haunt the average citizen, ranging from the 1915 genocide in which nearly 1.5 million people were exterminated to the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War where the small state lost large swaths of territory to Azerbaijan. Yet Armenian President Armen Sarkissian is upbeat about the country’s future, saying he believes a new generation of Armenians pushing for change can transform Armenia into a truly “global nation.” Sarkissian, a former ambassador to the United Kingdom, Belgium and the Netherlands, and who served a brief stint as prime minister between 1996-97, is also looking to the Armenian diaspora of some 7-10 million...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan have been a mainstay of world news. Most journalists who talk to the leaders of the two countries start their conversations by directing vexed questions about why conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave has dragged on for so long and what the future holds for relations between two neighbors whose differences seem unbridgeable. But Armenia is not all about its skirmishes with Azerbaijan. The first world country to officially adopt Christianity as a state religion in 301 AD, Armenia is the wellspring of an ancient civilization and has fared notably well in cementing its democratic credentials. It scores better than Singapore and Malaysia in the Freedom House’s...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: The coming weekend marks the Persian New Year. Nowruz, or New Day, heralds the advent of spring and jubilantly injects life into the frozen veins of nature. Even those who don’t celebrate it agree that this festival is an exceptional opportunity to enshrine the rejuvenation of the Earth after a chilly hibernation and embrace sights in our surroundings that manifest themselves on scarce occasions like the vernal equinox, which coincides with Nowruz this Saturday, March 20. It is true that Nowruz was originally the New Year festival of Iranians and a cohort of countries in Central Asia and the Middle East, but thanks to recognition by the United Nations and UNESCO, its venerable pedigree has been...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: It is disheartening, but the adherents of the world’s first monotheistic religion appear to have been consigned to oblivion in their ancestral homeland, and as their numbers shrink, it is not only a religion that is disappearing, but the building blocks of a civilization. Zoroastrianism is believed to have been founded in ancient Iran 3,500 years ago. It was the dominant religion of the Persian Empire until the Muslim conquest of Persia starting in AD 633 capsized the cultural and religious configuration of the nation and ushered in new values based on Islamic law in a society that initially perceived the arrival of Islam as unwelcome. Iran’s 2011 census found that there were only around 25,000...