At the Gate of All Nations in Persepolis, winged stone bulls still stand watch over the ruins of an empire that once stretched from the Indus to the Nile. Yet as a striking new visual feature from Tehran Times reminds us, Persia’s greatest export was never carved in stone alone — it was carried on water.
The footage dissolves from sun-gold columns and lamassu guardians to turquoise lagoons where wooden dhows rest on shallow sandbars. The message is unmistakable: for centuries, Persian civilisation reached far beyond its borders, connecting the Persian Gulf with East Africa by a highway of monsoon wind, sailcloth and song.
The Monsoon Highway
Long before steam engines, Persian merchants and sailors from ports such as Siraf, Hormuz and Bandar Abbas read the monsoon the way farmers read soil. Twice a year the winds reversed, and with them sailed dhows laden with textiles, glass, beads and carpets — returning with ivory, timber, gold and cloves.
But the cargo holds carried more than goods. As the Tehran Times feature puts it, Persian merchants and sailors carried trade, culture and traditions across the Indian Ocean. Language, cuisine, faith and custom travelled in the same hulls, unpacked slowly onto foreign shores over generations.
Children of Shiraz on the Swahili Coast
Nowhere did that cargo take root more deeply than Zanzibar. Coastal oral tradition and medieval chronicles alike trace strands of Swahili ancestry to Persia, and most romantically to Shiraz — the city of seven ships that, legend holds, brought the Shirazi founders of the coast’s stone towns, among them Ali ibn al-Hassan Shirazi, credited with founding the Kilwa Sultanate in the 10th century.
For Shia Journeys readers, the name Shiraz carries a deeper resonance. Pilgrims who have pressed their foreheads to the mirror-mosaic brilliance of the Shah Cheragh shrine share a hometown, in spirit, with the merchants whose descendants still identify as Shirazi along the Swahili coast. The Shirazi heritage, as the feature notes, reflects Persia’s deep and lasting influence in Zanzibar.
Stone Town’s Persian Soul
That influence is visible before it is audible. Aerial views of coral-rag villages give way to Stone Town’s labyrinthine alleys: merchant houses with shaded wooden balconies, inner courtyards and carved doors whose rosette and chain motifs echo Persian craftsmanship, adapted to coral stone and monsoon rain.
In the markets, scales tip over cloves, cardamom and cowpeas much as they do in the bazaars of Shiraz and Kerman. Even the kitchen testifies: the Swahili pilau, fragrant with spice, takes its name and soul from the Persian polow. Persian architecture, customs and traditions, the footage affirms, can still be found there today.
Fire, Drums and a Shirazi New Year
The most vivid survival burns once a year in Makunduchi, on Zanzibar’s southern coast. At Mwaka Kogwa — the Shirazi-derived new year widely linked to the Nowruz traditions of Persian settlers — crowds surge to drumbeats, young men settle the year’s grudges in mock stick fights, and a thatched hut is set alight so the old year turns to ash.
Seen in the film’s closing scenes, flames and festival crowds under palm trees, it is unmistakable: a Persian calendar still beating at the heart of the Indian Ocean.
Walking the Trail Today: Shia Journeys Travel Notes
Iran leg: Begin in Shiraz — Shah Cheragh shrine, Vakil Bazaar, the tombs of Hafez and Saadi — then drive to Persepolis to stand where the empire’s processions began.
Zanzibar leg: Wander UNESCO-listed Stone Town, cruise at sunset on a traditional dhow, and time your visit to late July for Mwaka Kogwa in Makunduchi.
Extended route: Add Kilwa Kisiwani on the Tanzanian mainland, ruin-crown of the Shirazi sultanate.
Good to know: Zanzibar is overwhelmingly Muslim; halal food is the norm, prayer times shape the day, and modest dress is appreciated in Stone Town and villages.
A Legacy That Endured
Empires fall, and ports silt up, but culture, once landed, does not leave. From Persepolis’ gateways to Zanzibar’s burning New Year hut, the story told in this footage is, in its own words, “a proud legacy of a great civilisation that crossed oceans and endured through centuries.”
For Shia Journeys travellers, it is also an invitation: some pilgrimages are measured not in miles to a shrine, but in the long, generous afterlife of a civilisation that sailed — and stayed.
