According to legend, ‘Kaviani’ was the name given to their standard by the Sassanian warriors who won their independence from the foreign ruler Zahhāk. Kaviani was meant to show the world their triumph against tyranny and foreign domination. It became a royal banner and the first flag of Persia, remaining so until the seventh century CE, and the story of this heroic uprising developed into the national myth of Iran.1 At the beginning of the twentieth century, during a sweeping political and cultural renaissance movement in Iran, this national narrative once again came to the fore. When Iran was occupied by British and Russian troops in 1907, exiled Iranians spread their national myth far beyond their nation’s borders. As far away as Weimar Berlin, the name of the Sassanian standard was bestowed upon a Persian printworks and publishing house. The company’s logo was the Farāvahār, originally a Zoroastrian symbol for the spirit that also became a secular and cultural icon, especially after the fall of the Sassanian empire. Contrary to what one might assume, however, Kaviani took on a transnational outlook after 1920 and printed multilingual anti-colonial periodicals in various languages and scripts—including Arabic, Farsi, Ottoman Turkish, Urdu, English, and German. From the Berlin suburb of Charlottenburg, its publications reached numerous colonized and semi-colonized territories across West Asia and North Africa.
Continue reading On the Trail of Kaviani- Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh, ‘Derafš-e kāvīān’, Encyclopaedia Iranica, 7 Nov. 2013. [↩]
