Idea Portal

Culture revisited

Persian New Year comes with a set of many different celebrations and traditions. there are many arguments regarding the origin of some of these traditions, some believe that the traditions are ancient persian culture and resemble old religions of people living in Iran, such as zoroasterianism (M-W:a Persian religion founded in the 6th century B.C. by the prophet Zoroaster, promulgated in the Avesta, and characterized by worship of a supreme god Ahura Mazda who requires good deeds for help in his cosmic struggle against the evil spirit Ahriman).

But there are also some arguments regarding the way people have tried to reject arabic influence on the persian culture. Anyways, It is obvious that these traditions have changed some a little, and some alot during thousand years. there is not much effort on critisising these parts of the culture, perhaps because it seems not to be very harmful to anybody at least in comparison with some other beliefs, or perhaps due to the ancient history of the culture, it is not much anticipated to ask if it is a fair tradition or not.
I'm not asking about many things, let's just take one! There are many items that each one resembles something in haft sin, one of which is the redfish. each year millions of these fish are bought by iranians as a part of the tradition, unfortunately most of these misrable creatures will die due to lack of attention to the way they are kept. Also because some people use to throw them into rivers after the celebrations the ecosystem of those areas would be dangerously perturbed. I wonder why no organization in Iran makes a decision in order to think of and create a reasonable replacement for this tradition?
the photo is a cropped image from Sam's daily does of imagery.