Kawa the Blacksmith

In a far-off age, the land of Media — today's Kurdistan — was ruled by a tyrant named Zahhak (Azhi Dahaka in the original Median), on whose shoulders had grown two serpents whose hunger could only be stilled by the brains of two Kurdish youths each day. The executioners came each morning to seize two young men from their homes; they were killed and their brains fed to the snakes. The horror lasted forty years until the blacksmith Kawa — who had already lost sixteen of his eighteen sons — could bear it no more. The day the soldiers came for his seventeenth, Kawa raised his iron hammer, struck the executioner, and blew his horn. He climbed the highest peak in his black leather apron, planted his standard, and lit a great fire so that the neighbouring villages would know tyranny had fallen. From every mountain the Kurds gathered behind him, marched on Zahhak's palace in Kermanshah, and overthrew him. That day — the 21st of March — is Newroz, and since then bonfires are lit on every peak each year, in memory of Kawa and of the victory of life over death.