‘Our culture is dying’: vulture shortage threatens Zoroastrian burial rites
Traditional Zoroastrian burial rites are becoming increasingly impossible to perform because of the precipitous decline of vultures in India, Iran and Pakistan.
For millennia, Parsi communities have traditionally disposed of their dead in structures called dakhma, or “towers of silence”. These circular, elevated edifices are designed to prevent the soil, and the sacred elements of earth, fire and water, from being contaminated by corpses.
Bodies are placed on top of the towers, where they decompose, while vultures and other scavengers eat the flesh on the bones. After being bleached by the sun and wind for up to a year, the bones are collected in an ossuary pit at the centre of the tower. Lime hastens their gradual disintegration, and the remaining material, along with rainwater runoff, filters through coal and sand before it is washed out to sea.
“We are no longer able to fulfil our traditions,” Hoshang Kapadia, a Karachi resident in his 80s, said. “We’ve lost a way of life, our culture.”
