Russian Vandalism of Persian Zoroastrianism

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Down to Earth Series · 9 pages

First published in The Theosophist Vol. I No. 1, October 1879, pages 19–21 — the opening issue of the magazine — and reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings II pages 122–30 under the title “Persian Zoroastrianism and Russian Vandalism.” The head-note summarises the case: that the four perpetual fires of the prehistoric Zoroastrian temple of Baku were extinguished and the event commemorated by three concrete flames, so that the Sacred Tetractys was decapitated.

The article opens on the general observation that few persons are capable of appreciating the truly beautiful, and fewer still of revering the monumental relics of bygone ages which prove that even in the remotest epochs mankind worshipped a supreme power and expressed its abstract conceptions in works meant to defy time. Blavatsky then turns to the Vandals — whether Slavic Wends or a barbarous nation of Germanic race, they came at all events from the North — and says a recent occurrence makes one regret that Justinian did not destroy them all, since worthy scions of those destroyers of monuments remain in the North. The occurrence is the action of certain Russian merchants: according to the late Russian papers, the Moscow arch-millionaire Kokoreff and his Tiflis partner Mirzoeff were desecrating and apparently about to destroy the Attesh-Gag of Baku, which she calls perhaps the oldest relic of Zoroastrianism in the world. The remainder describes what was being lost, for the benefit of readers who she says know nothing of it, few foreigners and perhaps as few Russians being acquainted with the sanctuary: a structure standing some twenty versts from the small town of Baku in the valley of Absharon, among the barren steppes of the Caspian shore, something between a mediaeval cathedral and a fortified castle, built in unknown ages — and, as she is careful to put it, standing there until a few months ago.

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