Last week, Mohsen Janjan, head of the Cultural Heritage and Tourism Department of Nahavand County in Iran’s Hamedan Province, announced that a fragment of an ancient stone pillar had been discovered during construction work in the Two Sisters area of Nahavand. “This discovery once again reveals the high potential of this historical area for archaeological research,” he said. “This new find could shed new light on the history of ancient civilizations in western Iran.”
Janjan also emphasized that initial investigations indicate that the discovered fragment has been moved from its original location and likely belongs to one of the region’s most significant ancient monuments. Accordingly, the discovery area has been completely secured and further construction work has been halted until expert studies are completed.
The head of the Cultural Heritage Department of Nahavand County concluded by saying, “Nahavand, as the only city in Iran that contains significant monuments from the Seljuk period, has a distinguished place in the country’s archaeology. The discovery of such works could open a new chapter in understanding the history of architecture and ancient civilizations of western Iran and add to the strategic importance of this region in the cultural map of ancient Iran.”
The question that remains unanswered, four or five decades, is: How could you, the heads of cultural heritage, who knew that “the ancient sites of Nahavand contain outstanding works of the past,” have so far left it alone and waited for “unauthorized excavators” to explore the area and possibly take some of the works, and only when a fragment of what they found or took remained, did you take the initiative to “secure the discovery site”?
