Culture · Essay
The Tower of Silence: a three-thousand-year-old practice stopped by a veterinary drug
Zoroastrian law forbids polluting earth, fire or water with a corpse, so the body is exposed on a raised tower to the birds. Then the vultures of South Asia died, and a practice that had worked since antiquity stopped working.Written to last.
By Confinity Editorial · 2026-08-21 · 6-minute readQuiet tools, kept out of the way.
Zoroastrian practice starts from a problem that most religions do not pose in quite this form. Earth, fire and water are sacred and must not be defiled. A dead body is the most polluting thing there is. Burial contaminates the ground; cremation contaminates the fire; committing a body to a river contaminates the water.
That rules out every common method of disposal and leaves one: exposure. The body is carried to a raised structure open to the sky and given to the birds, which is quick, complete and touches none of the three.
The structures are dakhma, and the English name for them, Tower of Silence, was coined by a nineteenth-century British translator in Bombay.
The design is functional and specific.
A dakhma is a circular, raised stone platform, open to the sky, with a low wall around the rim so that nothing is visible from outside. The surface slopes inward and is divided into three concentric rings: the outermost for men, the middle for women, the innermost for children.
At the centre is a well, the bhandar. Once the bones have been picked clean and bleached by the sun, they are placed into it, where they gradually break down. Channels lead from the well through beds of charcoal and lime, so that what drains from it is filtered before it can reach the ground.
Only the nasasalars, the corpse-bearers, may enter. The occupation is hereditary and its members have historically lived apart from the rest of the community, because they are in permanent contact with pollution. The family does not go in.
Before the body leaves for the tower, a rite called sagdid is performed: a dog is brought to look at the corpse. The dog's gaze is understood to drive off corruption, and it also served, in practical terms, as a check that the person was actually dead.
The system depended on one thing it had never needed to think about, which was a reliable supply of vultures. For three thousand years there was no reason to.
From the early 1990s the vulture population of South Asia collapsed. The cause, identified in the early 2000s, was diclofenac: a cheap anti-inflammatory given to working cattle, which is lethal to vultures that feed on a carcass shortly after the animal has been treated. Populations of the white-rumped, Indian and slender-billed vulture fell by well over ninety per cent, in what is one of the fastest declines of any bird species on record. Veterinary diclofenac was banned in India in 2006.
For the Parsi community of Bombay, the consequence was immediate and practical. Bodies at the Doongerwadi towers on Malabar Hill were no longer being consumed. What had taken a matter of hours took months, in the middle of a city.
The responses have been technological, contested and only partly successful.
Solar concentrators were installed at Doongerwadi to accelerate desiccation, focusing sunlight onto the platform. They work in the dry season and do very little during the monsoon, which in Bombay is a substantial part of the year.
Proposals for captive vulture aviaries adjacent to the towers have been discussed for two decades, and would require breeding birds in a diclofenac-free environment and releasing or housing them on site. Progress has been slow and the arrangements complicated.
A growing minority of Parsis now choose cremation or burial instead. That has produced a genuine and painful split, because the orthodox position is that these are not permissible and that priests should not perform the funerary prayers for someone cremated. Disputes over whether such families may use the prayer halls at Doongerwadi have gone to court.
Underneath it sits a demographic problem. The Parsi population of India is small and shrinking: something over fifty thousand at the last census, down from more than twice that in the middle of the twentieth century. A practice that requires a dedicated site, a hereditary occupational group, a priesthood and a functioning ecosystem is being maintained by a community that is losing people faster than it can replace them.
Zoroastrian practice in Iran diverged decades earlier.
Exposure was prohibited by the state in the 1970s on public-health grounds, and Iranian Zoroastrians moved to burial in graves lined with stone and concrete, so that the body does not touch the earth directly. The reasoning is the same as the towers': the requirement is not exposure as such, it is non-defilement, and a sealed grave satisfies it.
The abandoned dakhmas outside Yazd stand on their hills and are visited by tourists. They are among the more disconcerting monuments anywhere, because they are recent, purpose-built, and no longer in use for reasons entirely unconnected with belief.
A dakhma leaves no remains, no grave, no marker and no place to go.
Parsi remembrance therefore sits entirely in the calendar and in prayer. The Muktad days at the year's end are given to the fravashis, the ancestral spirits, who are invited back and received with flowers and named prayers. Anniversaries are marked with prayers at a fire temple, and the names of the dead are recited by the priest.
That is a completely different architecture from a family plot. Nothing is maintained in stone. Everything depends on a list of names being read out on the right days by somebody trained to do it.
The lesson here is not about doctrine. Zoroastrian teaching on the treatment of the dead has not changed. Nobody's belief lapsed.
What happened is that a practice depending on an external system stopped working when that system failed, for reasons originating in cattle medication. Three thousand years of continuity ended, in effect, in a decade, because of a decision taken by veterinary suppliers who had never heard of it.
Every family record has an equivalent dependency, and it is usually invisible until it fails: the format, the device, the account, the company. The photographs are fine. The thing they are stored on is the vulture.
That dependency can at least be made explicit and survivable, which is the one part of any of this that anybody gets to design. It is what Confinity is for.
What a dakhma is