Hawraman is not a village built on a mountain. It is a mountain taught to become a town — roof by roof, terrace by terrace, song by song. The Hawrami Kurds have been teaching it for five thousand years, and they are here still: climbing a staircase of stone where the roof of each house is the front yard of the one above.
"In the reign of the King of Kings, Arsaces … the vineyard called Dādbakān … was sold."
From a deed of sale found at Hawraman, written here in 88 BCE
The Hawrami did not build a village on a mountain. They turned the mountain into a village. On a slope above the Sirvan gorge — too steep, in places, to stand on comfortably — hundreds of stone houses are stacked directly up the rock, each one set back and above the last, so that the flat roof of every house is the courtyard, the threshold, and the front yard of the house above it. There are, in any ordinary sense, no streets. The roofs are the streets.
Seen from across the gorge, the whole of Uraman Takht (اورامان تخت) — the heart of the Hawraman region (هورامان) — reads as one continuous staircase of stone, climbing toward the peak the locals call Takht, the throne, from which the village takes its name. Each roof holds the doorstep of the house above; each doorstep is someone else's roof. The houses are dry-stone, fitted without mortar by hand, a craft passed down for millennia. The village does not spread. It rises.
And it is not a museum. The people who built this staircase still live on it. The Hawrami are an agropastoral Kurdish people who have farmed these slopes since about 3000 BCE; they speak Hawrami — a tongue of the Gorani branch, older and more conservative than the Kurdish of the towns below, and once a literary language of the Kurds — and they keep a winter festival, Pir Shalyar, whose roots may reach into the pre-Islamic past. Every wall you pass was laid by hand, by someone whose family has been laying these walls for five thousand years.
In 2021 UNESCO inscribed all of it — the tiered villages, the dry-stone terraces, the seasonal migrations up and down the mountain — as the Cultural Landscape of Hawraman/Uramanat. What the listing protects is not a monument but a verb: the slow, unfinished act of a people teaching a mountain to be a town.
It takes four moves. Each is an answer to the same impossible question — how do you build, and grow food, on a slope too steep to stand on? — and the Hawrami worked them all out by hand, over millennia.
The mountainside is too steep for conventional building. So the houses are terraced directly into it, each one set back and above the last, so that the roof of the lower house becomes the level courtyard of the upper. The village climbs the cliff as a single continuous staircase. Nothing is wasted; no flat ground is left unused.
The houses are built of local stone, fitted together without mortar — a dry-stone technique that requires enormous skill, allows the walls to flex slightly in this seismically active region, and uses only materials carried from the immediate surroundings. The craft has been passed from builder to builder for thousands of years.
The same dry-stone technique builds the agricultural terraces — narrow shelves of retained soil cut into the slope, where the Hawrami grow walnuts, pomegranates, mulberries, grapes, and vegetables. Farming on a near-vertical mountain is made possible one stone wall at a time. UNESCO singled out this gardening on dry-stone terraces as a defining feature of the landscape.
Because no single altitude provides year-round pasture, the Hawrami practise seasonal vertical migration — moving themselves and their livestock between lower winter settlements and higher summer pastures. They are, in UNESCO's words, a semi-nomadic people, perfectly tuned to a landscape that demands movement to survive.
The claim that the Hawrami have farmed these slopes for five thousand years can sound like the usual heritage hyperbole. It is not. In 1909, in a sealed stone jar in a cave on Kuh-e Salan, above the village of Shahr-e Hawraman, a villager found three pieces of parchment. They turned out to be among the oldest dated documents ever recovered from Iran.
The Avroman parchments are legal deeds. Two are written in Greek and one in Parthian, and together they span from 88 BCE to 33 CE. What they record is almost unbearably ordinary: the sale of a vineyard. One deed sets the price at thirty drachmae, names the buyer and the brothers selling it, stipulates how the land must be managed, makes provision for the supply of water, and lays down penalties if either side breaks the bargain. They were studied and translated by the philologist Ellis Minns in 1915, and now sit in the British Museum.
Read that again. Two thousand years ago, in these exact valleys, someone bought a vineyard, worried about the water rights, and had it written down. And today, a few ridges away, the Hawrami are still cutting terraces into the same rock and growing grapes, walnuts and pomegranates on them, still dividing the water, still passing the orchards down. The parchments are not a relic of a vanished people. They are an early entry in a ledger that has never closed.
The language carries the same depth. Hawrami belongs to the Gorani group, which linguists count among the most archaic living branches of Iranian — and Gorani was once the great literary tongue of the Kurds, the language of the classical poets of the Ardalan court, among them the nineteenth-century master Mawlawi Tawagozi. Today UNESCO classes Hawrami as "definitely endangered," spoken by only some tens of thousands of people as the young leave for the cities. The deed survived two thousand years in a jar. Whether the language survives the next hundred is, quietly, the real question hanging over Hawraman.
The difference between Hawraman and a museum is that no one here is performing. The Hawrami language is spoken at home, not revived; the winter festival is kept, not re-enacted; the line dance happens because there is something to dance about. The culture is not on display. It is simply still going on.
The most famous Hawrami tradition is the Pir Shalyar ceremony, held in the depths of winter — around the last Wednesday and Thursday before the 15th of Bahman, in early February. It commemorates Pir Shalyar, a revered local mystic and healer, and by tradition the marriage of his daughter; its roots are believed by some to reach back more than a thousand years, possibly into the pre-Islamic past of the region.
People pour into Uraman Takht from villages across the region in their most vivid clothes. Sheep are sacrificed, a communal stew is cooked and shared, and the men gather to play the daf — the frame drum — in great rhythmic circles, chanting and drumming until it builds to a trance, while the line dances unfold across the rooftops. Snow on the stone, drums rolling off the gorge, hundreds of dancers in colour: a midwinter rite that pulls a whole region up the mountain, and that almost no foreign visitor has ever seen.
An ancient dialect of the Gorani group, distinct from surrounding Kurdish and prized by linguists as one of the most conservative living branches of northwestern Iranian — a window into the deep linguistic past.
Hawrami women wear vivid gowns adorned with sequins and beads, with a short dark vest and a Kurdish hat or light scarf. The men wear baggy trousers, a sash, and the distinctive Kurdish turban. Colour everywhere, against grey stone.
The frame-drum (daf) drives Hawrami music, and the halparke — a shoulder-to-shoulder line dance — is performed at every celebration. Unaccompanied storytelling songs carry the region's history in melody.
The handmade Kurdish shoe — a cotton-soled, hand-stitched slipper called klash — is a craft specialty of the region, made by hand over many days. Along with woollen rugs and wood carving, it is the prize souvenir of Hawraman.
Uraman Takht itself is the main event — wander its stepped lanes, climb from rooftop to rooftop, and look back across the gorge — but the wider Hawraman holds more.
The wooden, tent-shaped tomb of the mystic Pir Shalyar, and the focal point of the winter festival. A quiet, atmospheric shrine at the heart of the village.
One of the largest springs in the region, gushing 3,000–4,000 litres per second of pure mountain water — a natural wonder associated in local lore with ancient deities. The lifeblood of the valley.
A breathtaking stone village clinging to a cliff above the Sirvan River, in the Kermanshah part of Hawraman — even more dramatically sited than Uraman Takht, with caves and a riverside setting.
Another stunning stepped village nearby, quieter and less visited, with trout farms along its river and the same roof-as-courtyard architecture. A peaceful alternative or addition.
An ancient stone mosque built into the mountain, and the ruins of a Safavid-era castle — layers of the region's long history standing among the houses.
The green river valley below the village — a tributary of the Tigris — offers walking, the Daryan dam reservoir, and some of the most beautiful river-and-mountain scenery in western Iran.
It is easy, among the terraces and the trance-drums, to forget that Hawraman is first a wild mountain — and not a gentle one. The oak forests and gorges here are among the most biodiverse in the Zagros, which is part of why UNESCO listed them. The endangered Persian leopard still moves through the crags, alongside brown bear and wolf, with bezoar ibex on the high rock and trout in the spring-fed rivers, much of it sheltered in the Bozin and Markhil protected area to the southwest. The Hawrami did not settle beside this wild. They settled inside it — and the whole staircase, the seasonal migration, the dry-stone walls are the shape of a people fitting themselves to a mountain that was never going to be tamed.
Untamed Iran rates each destination on two separate dimensions — Adventure, the demands a place makes on your body, and Legacy, the weight it carries in culture, history, and meaning. Hawraman is a moderate physical climb wrapped around one of the deepest living cultural worlds in Iran — five thousand years of a people and a language, still here, still singing.
You arrive in the late afternoon, when the low sun is raking across the gorge, and you look up at the village from the road, and your brain refuses to parse it for a moment. It is not a hillside with houses on it. It is a hillside made of houses — hundreds of them, stacked one above another all the way up the mountain, each flat roof holding the next house's doorstep, the whole settlement glowing honey-gold in the slanting light. You start to climb. And you realise that the "street" you are on is also a roof, and the roof above you is also a street, and somewhere a child is running across what is simultaneously her playground and her neighbour's ceiling, and an old woman in a dress the colour of pomegranates is sitting in a doorway shelling walnuts that grew on a terrace her great-great-grandmother built by hand.
And then, if you are lucky, you hear it: the daf. Somewhere up the slope, someone is drumming — that deep, resonant frame-drum beat that has echoed off these same stones for a thousand years — and a voice rises with it, singing in a language older than Persian, older than the Kurdish spoken in the towns below, a language that was old when this village was already ancient. The sound rolls down the staircase of stone and fills the gorge. You stand still on a rooftop that is also a street that is also a thousand years of human stubbornness and ingenuity and beauty, and you understand that you are not looking at a monument. You are standing inside a civilisation that never stopped.
That is the gift of Hawraman. Not stone, not scenery, but continuity — the almost unbearable sense of a people who looked at the steepest, hardest mountain imaginable and decided, five thousand years ago, to stay, and who are still here: still climbing those same stairs, still drumming, still growing pomegranates on walls of stacked rock.
A whole town built as a single staircase up the cliff, where the roof of each house is the yard of the one above — farmed, danced, and sung on for five thousand years, and lived in still.
I sat by a little stream in the village of Hani Garmaleh, in the shade of a big, generous pomegranate tree. I stretched my feet across to the far bank — to the soil of Iraq — leaned back against the near edge, and lit my cigarette. The smoke kept drifting back and forth between Iran and Iraq before it thinned out enough that I could no longer follow it.
In Europe this might be nothing. But here, in the Middle East, the only power that could ignore the borders is a civilisation thousands of years older than they are. This one was an international cigarette.
Spring at its finest — the Zagros turns green, the orchards blossom and the terraces fill with leaf, the rivers run full, and the weather is mild. The most beautiful and comfortable season to walk the village. Ideal.
Autumn brings the walnut and pomegranate harvest, golden leaves on the terraces, crisp mountain air, and thinner crowds. A gorgeous, atmospheric time, with the community busy with the harvest.
The Pir Shalyar festival. Cold, often snowy, demanding — but the single most extraordinary time to come if you want to witness the living culture at its most intense. Drums, dance, colour, and snow on stone.
Summer is hot and busy with domestic tourists; midwinter (outside the festival) is cold and snowbound, with difficult roads. Both are doable but less ideal — summer for crowds, winter for access.
🥁 The Pir Shalyar festival (red, February) is the cultural high point of the Hawrami year and one of the most remarkable winter festivals in Iran — but its exact dates shift with the calendar, and it draws large crowds in cold, snowy conditions. If this is your goal, confirm the dates locally well in advance and prepare for serious winter weather and full accommodation.
Hawraman is welcoming, but it is a living village, a UNESCO site, and a traditional Sunni Kurdish community — visiting well means visiting with care. Detail folded away below; open only what you need.
Remote and high in the Zagros near the Iraqi border; an overnight in a stone homestay is the way to do it justice.
A mountainous UNESCO cultural landscape in western Iran; Uraman Takht is its best-known village, where the stone houses are stacked so the roof of each is the courtyard of the one above — a town built as a single staircase. Inscribed by UNESCO in 2021.
The slope is too steep for ordinary building, so houses are terraced into it, each above the last, the lower roof becoming the upper courtyard. They are dry-stone (no mortar), which lets the walls flex in this earthquake-prone region.
An agropastoral Kurdish people who, by UNESCO's account, have lived here since about 3000 BCE. They are semi-nomadic, moving with the seasons, and speak Hawrami (Gorani), an old, conservative dialect once a major Kurdish literary language.
An ancient winter ritual in early February — daf drumming, line dancing, shared feasting and pilgrims from across Kurdistan, commemorating a local mystic. Dates shift with the calendar; confirm locally.
Spring (Apr–Jun) and autumn (Sep–Oct) for weather and harvest; early February for Pir Shalyar in cold, snowy, crowded conditions.
It's a living Sunni Kurdish village: stay in a stone homestay, ask before photographing people (especially women), dress modestly, buy from local makers, and don't climb on roofs that are homes.
Hawraman is the jewel of a region that rewards a full week. Combine Uraman Takht with the cliff-village of Hajij and the quieter stepped village of Palangan, the green city of Marivan and its Zarivar Lake, the provincial capital Sanandaj — a centre of Kurdish music — and the multi-storey ancient cave-city of the Karaftu Caves. Further east in Kermanshah, the same mountains hold the towering reliefs and inscription of Bisotun. And across the collection, Hawraman belongs to a small family of living mountain cultures that simply refused to leave their stone: the hand-dug troglodyte village of Meymand and the cone houses of Kandovan are its cousins in rock, while the seasonal up-and-down migration of the Hawrami is the same rhythm that drives the Bakhtiari nomads to the ice cave of Chma. This is the heart of Iranian Kurdistan — where the mountains, the music, and the welcome are all equally generous.
This article draws on the UNESCO record and Kurdish cultural sources, and is careful to frame the deep dates as the antiquity of a people and a way of life, not of any single standing house.
Facts last reviewed June 2026. Established: Hawraman/Uramanat is a UNESCO cultural landscape (2021) of tiered dry-stone villages in Kurdistan and Kermanshah; the roof-as-courtyard architecture, dry-stone terraces, semi-nomadic migration, Hawrami/Gorani language and Pir Shalyar festival are all documented, and UNESCO dates the Hawrami people's habitation to about 3000 BCE. Framing: the "five thousand years" describes the continuity of the Hawrami people and their adaptation to the mountains (per UNESCO's ~3000 BCE), not the age of any individual house — the Avroman parchments found nearby (88 BCE–33 CE) are firm documentary evidence of settled vineyard agriculture in these valleys two thousand years ago, and evidence of even earlier human presence in the territory (Middle Paleolithic) refers to the wider landscape, not the village. The Hawrami/Gorani language is classed by UNESCO as definitely endangered. Pir Shalyar's exact dates shift each year; confirm locally before travelling.