On the shoulder of a mountain road in northern Iran – the smell of wet earth in the air, trucks grinding past – a lean man in a thin jacket and messy hair, pushes a small handcart and keeps walking. Cars pull over at the site of him: someone passes him a bottle of water, someone else hands over a bag of dates, a couple asks for a selfie. Day after day, Shahram Goodarzi, an Iranian sculptor who has turned his life into a work of art, moves south from the town of Kelardasht toward Pasargadae, the burial place of Cyrus the Great. He set out on August 26, 2025, planning to cover roughly 900 kilometers and arrive on 7 Aban – “Cyrus Day,” an unofficial civic holiday linked to Cyrus’s peaceful entry into Babylon, and marked each year around October 29.
Born in 1976, Goodarzi studied painting at Azad University in Tehran, then chose to distance himself to the edge of the map – to the village of Tavidareh near Kelardasht – to work in quiet. Since 2016 he has been building the project of a lifetime: a monumental sculpture of Cyrus, about six meters tall and weighing more than twelve tons, a composition that casts the founder of the Achaemenid Empire as a mounted figure laden with historical symbolism. The open space around his workshop became a modest pilgrimage site: from families, students to the merely curious – all come to watch as layer by layer a figure from the past takes shape in concrete and steel.
In late 2023, as the sensitive Cyrus Day approached, Goodarzi was told by the regime to close his worksite to the public. Later his work was restricted and then halted; rumors of his arrest were denied, but the door was already closed, Goodarzi’s work ceased. Instead of waiting for the ice to thaw, he changed course and turned the road he walks into a work of art. If the statue was an attempt to give form to matter, the march is an attempt to give form to time.
Along the way he sometimes carries a wooden replica of the “Cyrus Cylinder” – a sixth-century BCE Persian clay cylinder bearing an Akkadian inscription. It describes Cyrus’ conquest of Babylon and his policy of restoring temples and allowing displaced peoples to return home. In modern Iranian culture the cylinder has taken on a popular meaning of tolerance and human rights, even if historians quarrel over how “modern” that interpretation really is. The replica helps express the message Goodarzy carries: not party slogans, but an appeal to a layer of identity that predates today’s politics.
The journey unfolds at a steady pace. His path leads him from the humid air of the coast of the Caspian sea up onto the drier Persian plateau. Short video clips of him flood social media: a gas station offering him assistance; a lorry driver stopping for a quick handshake; children waving the Iranian flag as they pass him by; a grocer placing a loaf of bread on his cart and whispering “safe travels”. Such scenes are numerous and diverse, but merge together as a single story: along Iran’s roads there is a hunger for a symbol around which they may join together in solidarity.
What is the spirit behind his stubborn journey? It is not explained in any party manifesto, and it is given to interpretation. To pro-government onlookers, the march may appear as an exercise in national unity: a state-compatible, explicitly non-religious narrative that rallies pride around Cyrus as a national emblem – one that soothes tensions without challenging the Islamic Republic’s authority. To opposition-minded Iranians, the same gestures read as a quiet rebuke: a turn toward pre-Islamic heritage as a cultural counter-claim, reclaiming space the state has tried to seize over “Cyrus Day” and hinting at an identity older, and freer, than the republic’s ideology. To many others, the political aspects are unintended: this is performative art, an artist converting years of blocked-in studio work into motion, stretching his workshop across hundreds of kilometers and making the act of walking into the raw material of his craft.
Call it a national unity, soft dissent, or nothing but art – Goodarzi keeps moving in the only language he is allowed to speak: footsteps. He turns doubt into distance and roadside kindness into momentum, until all commentaries falls away like dust. When he reaches the pale stone at Pasargadae, opinions may still differ, but one truth will hold: he chose a path and walked it, literally, until the path became his masterpiece.
Photograph: Alavivala, Wikimedia Commons
