Varzesh-e Pahlavani (Zurkhaneh)
Iranian physical and moral training in the zurkhaneh house of strength, with mil clubs, the sang shield and koshti wrestling.
Quick Facts
IranCharacter & Origin
Training
Organisation & Competition
What the style is built from
Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.
About Varzesh-e Pahlavani (Zurkhaneh)
Varzesh-e pahlavani is the Iranian system of physical and moral training practised in a building called the zurkhaneh, literally the house of strength. The hall has a ceiling with a single skylight and, in the middle, a sunken octagonal or circular pit, the gowd, about a metre deep, around which the audience and the musician sit. The session is led by the morshed: he beats a goblet drum, the zarb, recites verses from Persian mythology and from mystical poetry, and his rhythm sets the pace for the whole group. The apparatus is largely wood and iron: a pair of heavy clubs, the mil, a wooden shield, the sang, which the athlete swings lying on his back, and an iron bow, the kabbadeh, strung with a chain instead of a bowstring. Push-ups on a board, spinning on the spot and finally the wrestling itself, koshti pahlavani, complete the practice; out of that wrestling grew the Iranian freestyle school, one of the most successful in the world. The practice joins pre-Islamic Iranian heritage to Shia piety and Sufism, and morally it rests on javanmardi, chivalry: the stronger a man is, the humbler he must be. The international federation IZSF, founded on 10 October 2004, now has more than seventy member countries. UNESCO inscribed the zurkhaneh rituals on the representative list of intangible cultural heritage in 2010.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.