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evening sitdown
Your evening longread: The last members of the ancient Zoroastrian religion
It’s a coronavirus-free zone as we bring you an interesting longread each evening to take your mind off the news.
EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.
And now, every weeknight, we bring you an evening longread to enjoy which will help you to escape the news cycle.
We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.
Shaun Walker’s grandfather was a Zoroastrian. Here, Walker explores what the religion was all about, and how its popularity has waned.
(The Guardian, approx 27 mins reading time)
My grandfather stuck to his Zoroastrian faith doggedly, whatever obstacles life tossed into his path, but my mother was ejected from the Parsi fold, officially at least, when she married out. She came to London when she was 17, to go to university and then train as an English teacher. She slipped away from a planned marriage to a good Parsi boy, and later married my dad, another teacher from Southampton. Her parents, unlike many other relatives, quickly came to accept the marriage, but the strict community rules meant she was no longer a Parsi. Partly, she accepted this, and partly, she just ignored it. “No religious bigot was going to define who I was,” she told me, and she continued to feel deeply attached to the cultural aspects of being Parsi.
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