Every political order inherits a past it cannot fully control. In Iran, one of the most enduring sites of tension between state ideology and cultural memory is the ancient mid-winter festival of Sadeh, a ritual of fire whose persistence exposes the Islamic Republic’s unresolved relationship with Iran’s pre-Islamic inheritance. What appears, on the surface, as a seasonal celebration has become a quiet battleground over identity, visibility, and the limits of state authority. Sadeh, celebrated on the tenth day of Bahman, marks the symbolic discovery of fire and the human capacity to overcome cold and darkness.
Rooted in ancient Iranian cosmology and associated historically with Zoroastrian traditions, the festival predates Islam by centuries and has long functioned as a communal rather than exclusively religious practice.¹ Fire in Sadeh is not sacramental in the doctrinal sense but civilizational, a marker of continuity, warmth, and collective endurance.² This is precisely what makes the festival politically sensitive. The Islamic Republic, founded on a revolutionary narrative that privileges Shiʿi Islamic identity as the core of national legitimacy, has never fully reconciled itself to cultural practices that derive meaning outside the Islamic frame. While Iran’s leadership has selectively appropriated elements of Persian history for nationalist legitimacy, it has also remained deeply wary of rituals that generate non-religious forms of belonging.³
Sadeh sits uneasily within this contradiction. In recent years, this unease has translated into direct restrictions. Despite Sadeh’s inscription on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, a recognition that frames the festival as a shared cultural practice rather than a sectarian ritual, the Iranian authorities have increasingly limited public participation.⁴
According to reporting by Iran International, officials have barred non-Zoroastrians from attending public Sadeh ceremonies in several cities, confining celebrations to closed or tightly controlled spaces.⁵ The justification offered, crowd management or logistical concerns, rings hollow in a country where public gatherings are routinely politicized and policed. This restriction reflects a broader logic of governance. The Islamic Republic seeks to domesticate the pre-Islamic traditions, stripping them of their capacity to mobilize collective sentiment. Sadeh is permitted so long as it remains small, communal but not public, historical but not socially generative.
Such management mirrors the state’s approach to other cultural rituals, including Chaharshanbeh Suri, whose spontaneous street celebrations have repeatedly been framed as threats to public order.⁶ The political anxiety surrounding Sadeh intensified after its UNESCO recognition. While Iranian state media celebrated the international acknowledgment as a civilizational achievement, the same authorities moved swiftly to ensure that this recognition did not translate into mass participation.⁷
This contradiction underscores a deeper fear: that heritage, once widely shared, might become a resource for alternative narratives of Iranian identity, narratives that neither begin with the 1979 Revolution nor require clerical mediation. Journalistic accounts of contemporary Sadeh celebrations illustrate this tension vividly. Reports in AP News describe Zoroastrian communities celebrating the festival quietly, under watchful eyes, aware that visibility itself can provoke scrutiny.⁸ The presence of bonfires, large, luminous, collective, carries symbolic weight in a political environment that has grown increasingly intolerant of unsanctioned assembly. In a society where even mourning rituals have been securitized, the gathering of bodies around fire acquires political resonance, whether intended or not. What unsettles the state is “memory”.
Sadeh invokes a temporal depth that resists ideological compression. It recalls an Iran whose moral universe was not organized around Islamic jurisprudence, whose seasonal rhythms were governed by cosmology rather than clerical calendars. Scholarly accounts of the festival emphasize its role in reinforcing social cohesion and seasonal renewal rather than religious orthodoxy.⁹ That distinction matters. A ritual that binds people through shared history rather than shared doctrine threatens the monopolization of meaning on which ideological states depend.
The Islamic Republic’s response has been one of selective tolerance. On paper, the state affirms cultural diversity; in practice, it restricts cultural agency. Tehran Times coverage of Sadeh often frames it as a benign heritage artifact, carefully depoliticized and detached from contemporary social dynamics.¹⁰ This framing neutralizes the festival by reducing it to folklore, safe, static, and administratively manageable. Yet folklore becomes dangerous when people claim it as lived identity rather than museum heritage. For younger Iranians, especially those distanced from institutional religion, festivals like Sadeh offer something increasingly rare: a non-ideological form of collective belonging.
The appeal lies not in Zoroastrian doctrine but in symbolism, light against darkness, warmth against cold, continuity against rupture. In an era marked by political repression and cultural fatigue, such symbolism resonates powerfully, even when expressed quietly.¹¹ The suppression of public participation in Sadeh thus reflects a broader strategy of cultural containment. By limiting who may attend, where, and under what conditions, the state attempts to prevent cultural memory from becoming political consciousness.
Yet this strategy is inherently unstable. Memory cannot be indefinitely privatized. Each restriction affirms the very fear it seeks to suppress: that people recognize in these rituals a past and a future not fully governed by the present order. Sadeh’s fire continues to burn, though increasingly behind barriers. Its glow illuminates more than ancient myth; it reveals the fragility of a political system that fears unscripted togetherness. In the end, the struggle over Sadeh is not about a festival. It is about who gets to define Iran’s story—and whether that story must always pass through the narrow gate of ideology.
Notes
- UNESCO, “Sadeh/Sada Celebration,” Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. 2. Ali Akbar Jafarey, “Jashn-e Sadeh and the Discovery of Fire,” Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies (CAIS). 3. “Sadeh: an ancient celebration of fire and light,” Tehran Times, January 28, 2025. 4. UNESCO, “Sadeh/Sada Celebration.” 5. “Iran bans public from taking part in Zoroastrian festival,” Iran International, January 30, 2025. 6. “Sadeh, the ancient festival of mid-winter, added to national heritage list,” Tehran Times, May 26, 2020. 7. “Iran to celebrate UNESCO recognition of Sadeh festival,” Tehran Times, January 27, 2024. 8. “With bonfires and hope, Iran’s minority Zoroastrians celebrate Sadeh,” AP News, January 31, 2024. 9. Jafarey, “Jashn-e Sadeh and the Discovery of Fire.” 10. Tehran Times, multiple heritage features on Sadeh (2020–2025). 11. AP News, January 31, 2024.
The writer is M.A. in History from University of Kashmir, Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir. munshiyamin5@gmail.com