Sacred Groves as a Safe Shelter for Biodiversity and Culture in Kurdistan
Protecting biodiversity in less developed and developing countries is a great challenge, especially in areas with endless wars, weak governments, poverty, and ongoing climate change. While the unsustainable use of natural resources is at its maximum in Kurdistan, the failure of formal conservation plans is not surprising. However, local people are voluntarily protecting certain parts of their surroundings because of their religious and cultural values: Sacred natural sites are places where traditional myths, legends and stories meet local ecological knowledge and environmental protection. In a recent vegetation survey, we have examined the extent to which such protection practices contribute to the ‘by-product’ of biodiversity conservation in the sacred groves of the Northern Zagros, Iran.
The Middle East is recognized as the origin of ancient civilizations and a high biocultural diversity.
In the Kurdish territory, people are highly dependent on their natural environment for their livelihood and many of them keep their traditional lifestyles. They have managed natural resources sustainably for millennials by applying the Traditional Ecological Knowledge inherited from their ancestors. In recent decades, however, population growth, uncoordinated development, and increasing demand for technology and urban lifestyle have changed the balance between people and nature in this biocultural hotspot. The higher pressure on nature resulted in overgrazing, land-use change, soil erosion, depletion of underground water resources, and biodiversity erosion.
Sacred natural sites and biocultural diversity
Sacred natural sites can be found all over the world. They include mountains, caves, deserts, lakes, rivers, water sources, trees, groves, and forests. Local people’s active protection of these sites has been based on their spiritual, religious, or cultural values for generations. Many of them are located in biodiversity-rich areas.
Since they interlink biodiversity with spiritual and cultural values, they are recognized as hotspots of biocultural diversity.
While sacred natural sites are appreciated for their conservation values, they are under-researched in Muslim countries, so that their overall contribution to biodiversity conservation remains unknown.
The practice of creating and maintaining sacred natural sites has persisted from pre-Muslim to Muslim societies mainly due to the veneration of saints. For instance, in the Kurdish territory of Iran, sacred natural sites are rooted in ancient religions like Mithraism and Zoroastrianism. Despite the Arab conquest of the Persian Empire in the 7th-8th century AD and the subsequent conversion of Kurdish people to Islam in the 16th-17th century, until very recently almost every village maintained its own sacred place — e.g. a part of the forest, a valley, a mountain summit, or a spring with its surroundings.
Sacred groves: spiritual values and taboos
In Kurdistan, more than 90% of sacred natural sites serve as burial grounds to the villages: Local people see them as an abode of their ancestors’ body and soul. Therefore, they strictly protect these sites as “sacred groves”. Generally, when there is no more space for burial in the old grove, one or several people endow part of their woodland as a new cemetery to the village, which will again be maintained and protected by the local community.
Sacred groves are small in size (on average 1.0 ha) and mostly located in plain terrain with convenient access to the road network. Some of them include a grave belonging to a saint, which is recognized as a “holy Shakhs”. These groves possess higher spiritual value for people, thus are typically larger in size and better preserved. In some cases, Shakhs have become pilgrimage sites with thousands of visitors per year.
Sacred groves are protected through taboos and strict rules, including the prohibition of livestock grazing, hunting, and collection of fodder, edible plants for commercial use, lumber, and fuel-wood. Additionally, local people protect sacred groves from land encroachment and wildfires by light pollarding (approximately every 10 years) and collecting dead branches to establish a hedge around the sacred grove.
Personal experiences and traditional stories
As a child growing up in the rural areas of Kurdistan, I have learned that there are restrictions in accessing and playing in specific areas. From my grandfather I learned that sacred groves are the burial place to our ancestor’s souls and bodies. There was almost no physical barrier around them, but the taboos, myths, legends, and stories surrounding these places were so impressive that they formed a hedge of fear and respect around them in my brain.
Every living and non-living thing inside a sacred grove is cherished and has high spiritual value since it is protected by souls.
Every village has its own stories about people who disrespected the groves and have been punished by nature in different ways: Shepherds who decided to make use of the high-quality forage inside the sacred grove and consequently lost their livestock due to an unknown sickness ; or people who tried to hunt treasure inside the groves and were bitten by snakes or scorpions; a man who tried to hunt in a sacred grove but mistakenly shot his son and got mad after his death.
At the same time, there are stories about the generosity of sacred groves to the people who respect and protect them. In most stories such people get their needs fulfilled by the souls of the sacred grove. There are, for example, many stories about infertile women who get pregnant after offering or protecting animals and plants of a sacred grove.
Such stories have been passed on between generations and form the pillars of the taboos and restrictions that lead to the groves’ protection.
Taxonomic diversity, vegetation composition and conservation status
In our recent study, we conducted a vegetation survey in 22 sacred groves and 45 surrounding woodlands of Kurdistan, western Iran, to compare the taxonomic diversity, vegetation composition, and conservation status of plant species in sacred and non-sacred sites.
The landscape is covered with semi-arid oak woodlands and the main livelihood means of local people are herding and farming, forming a traditional agro-silvopastoral system called “Galazani”. In this system, people depend on oak leaves (as leaf fodder) to feed their Maraz goats, therefore the understory is grazed intensively and oak trees are pollarded in 3-4-year rotations. Sacred groves, however, are strictly preserved from such grazing and other disturbances.
The results of our study indicate that sacred groves have higher taxonomic diversity than surrounding woodlands and their vegetation composition is substantially different.
The 22 sacred groves in the Baneh area comprised 20% of the flora in the whole northern Zagros region.
Traditional deliberate protection (based on religious and cultural values) plus some environmental variables were the main drivers of the distinct vegetation composition of sacred groves. In the surrounding woodlands, heavy grazing and pollarding of oak trees support light-demanding, ruderal, and unpalatable plants, whereas sacred groves are colonized by shade-tolerant, nutrient-demanding, and woodland specialists.
Conservation status of plants: biodiversity as a by-product
More importantly, sacred groves shelter numerous endangered plant species and a more complex niche for Zootaxa. Out of the evaluated plant species in the sacred groves, at the national level, 6% were endangered and critically endangered, 13% were near threatened, and 7% were in vulnerable categories.
Although the main motivation of local people to preserve sacred groves is for their spiritual and cultural significance, still biodiversity and habitat conservation is a significant by-product of sacred groves, essential for many plant species.
Among the endangered species, only the Fritillaria imperialis (Crown Imperial Lily) and Fritillaria straussii are of high spiritual and cultural value to local people in themselves: They are considered symbols of resurrection and love and protected no matter where they grow. Sacred groves in Kurdistan may harbor yet unrecognized plants. They are important for protecting faunal diversity by providing suitable ecological niches for arthropods and vertebrates such as the Caucasian squirrel (Sciurus anomalus Gmelin), whose population has dramatically declined in Zagros because of habitat loss and overhunting.
Despite the small extent of sacred groves, our findings indicate that they can serve as an important complement to formally protected areas. The vegetation composition and structure of sacred groves provide necessary baselines to reconstruct degraded areas. Given that sacred groves are globally endangered through resource-use pressures, poor governance, socioeconomic inequity, war, and corruption, the conservation status of the sacred groves in Kurdistan is remarkable.
We recommend that this traditional protection be encouraged to conserve both nature and culture at one of the hotspots of biodiversity and civilization in the Middle East.
Full study: Shakeri, Z., Mohammadi-Samani, K., Bergmeier, E., Plieninger, T. (2021): Spiritual values shape taxonomic diversity, vegetation composition, and conservation status in woodlands of the Northern Zagros, Iran. Ecology and Society 26. URL: https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol26/iss1/art30/.
