A new year arrives, as it always does, with hyacinths, mirrors, fire, and that old Persian genius for survival. But this year, some of Iran’s most beloved historical sites stand closed. Tom of Hafez is hushed. Persepolis waits behind locked gates. Hegmataneh (Ecbatana), older than every official statement ever issued in its name, remains where it has always been: watching.
There is something especially grotesque in the Islamic Republic’s announcement that Iran has closed major historical sites during Nowruz, including Hafez’s tomb, Persepolis, and Hegmataneh. As though this were breaking news. As though a regime that has spent months sealing off memory can now repackage the same act as a seasonal update. By the Ministry of Heritage’s own account, museums and historic sites have been shuttered since the start of the Iran War on February 28, 2026. To announce it now as though it were a fresh measure is not mere bureaucratic farce. It is gaslighting in the Islamic Republic’s preferred register: stale cruelty, repainted as public information.
All this while Iranians are trapped behind internet shutdowns, cut off from one another, and turning back, with increasing clarity and hunger, toward the depth of their pre-Islamic inheritance. Which is precisely what makes the spectacle so vulgar. The state still imagines heritage as a prop, a gate, a podium, a press line. Something to unveil, conceal, or narrate into obedience.
But Iran’s heritage is much … much older than the regime by 7,000 years, and less gullible than its ministers. It survives in stone, in dust, in verses recited from memory, in rituals carried by people when institutions fail them. A closed tomb is still a poem. A silent ruin is still a witness. Empires have collapsed before these places. So have their liars.
Nowruz has never belonged to comfort. It belongs to renewal, to defiance, to the annual insistence that winter does not get the last line.
So we greet this year with grief, resilience, and tremendous hope for a free and prosperous Iran. With memory intact. With fire intact. With the unfashionable conviction that culture belongs to people, not power.
Nowruz Piruz.
May light enter, even through locked doors.