Borj-e Kashaneh

There is a beautiful 20-meter-high tower in the southeast of Bastam Jama masjid (congregational mosque or Friday mosque) in the north of Shahrud. It is known as Borj-e Kashaneh (Kashaneh Tower) and it is registered in the Iranian heritage list as “tower tomb near Jama masjid.

The tower has a thirty-side regular shape and there are two rows of huge bricks on top of it. There is some inscription on the bricks that on one of them, the name “Uljeitu” is written in Cufic and on another, the Basmala (bi-smi llāhi r-raḥmāni r-raḥīm) is engraved in Thuluth.

Regarding the inscription at the entrance to the tower, this monument is built in seven hundred AH and it belongs to seventh or eighth century AH, however, the historical evidence says that the exact year of its establishment is not clear. The residents of Bastam believe that this tower was a fire temple in Zoroastrianism during the pre-Islamic era and after that, it was a tower for observation and according to its structure, it is possible that it was an observatory.

André Godard, famous orientalist and iranologist, believe that this monument is one of the works that Mahmud Ghazan (the seventh ruler of the Mongol Empire) commanded to build it. He said that this tower was called Ghazaneh and step by step, it was called Kashaneh.

To visit this historical monument, you should go to the south of Bastam in Semnan Province. The land that was called Qūmis or Kumis in the past.

The different bricks on top of the tower show that some parts of the roof were destroyed in the past and they were repaired.

It is possible to enter the tower through the mosque and the small hallway beside the mihrab. This hallway has three stucco walls on which Ayat Al-Kursi (often known in English as The Throne Verse is the 255th verse of the 2nd surah of the Quran, Al-Baqarah), and some other Arabic phrases can be found. This hallway joins the mosque to the tower.

There is a very deep well in the middle of this tower and its height is twenty-four meters inside. A very small stairway and its dark hallway are used to get to the top of the tower that evokes the feeling for visitors that they are traveling to a long time ago.