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Diarna and “Esther’s Shrine” Featured in Tablet Magazine

In the poet Mowlana Shahin-i Shirazi’s re-telling of the Book of Esther as an Iranian epic, Hegai, a Zoroastrian priest, approaches the lovelorn shah Ardashir and “like a lion” revealed to him the secret of Esther – whose peerless existence had not previously been known to the royal court. Another secret, however, that of Esther’s Jewish identity, endured for sometime thereafter. seo companies . As in the story, Diarna has discovered through research on Iran’s historic Jewish sites that secrecy, indeed a double secret, shrouds the Hamadan shrine to Esther and Mordechai. Knowledge of the shrine is limited outside of the Iranian-Jewish community. Those who do know about the site’s existence are mostly unaware of how Yassi Gabbay, the architect of its renovation in the early 1970s, rooted his design in Persian and Islamic architecture. For instance, the site’s once iconic fence with a “Jewish” or “six-point star, combined of two triangles” motif was an homage to an Isfahani mosque ceramic. An article in Tablet Magazine highlights Diarna’s efforts to make this site and its fascinating history digitally accessible: