So many Iranians killed, funeral traditions are changing
As the Iranian regime’s violence disrupts burial traditions, some Iranians are reinventing how they mourn by publicly singing and dancing.
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YEREVAN, Armenia – The funerals for Farzam Ghasemi and Arshia Hozouri were anything but traditional.
The childhood friends were killed in Tehran during protests sparked by a crashing Iranian economy.
“[Before the protests] funerals were the same, but this one was very different,” said Ali. “It hurt more. It carried a sense of revenge.”
Farzam and Ali were friends who worked at the same record label, where Farzam was a rapper.
“Every face was filled with rage,” Ali said of the funeral.
This quiet fury was brewing among mourners at Behesht-e Zahra cemetery, the largest cemetery in Tehran. They were like embers under the ashes, Ali said. Armed revolutionary guards lurked amongst the cemetery crowd and threatened the group of about 1,000 mourners.
The death toll in Iran has been nearly impossible to verify amid internet shutdowns, misreporting, and the sheer scale of the violence. To this day, full internet access has not been restored.
Top Iranian health officials have cited figures as high as 30,000 while HRANA (Human Rights Activists News Agency) estimates about 22,000 – in the fog of the present moment, the numbers may be much higher. These bodies are flooding Iran’s morgues and cemeteries, and have become political symbols themselves.
As bodies accumulate, funeral rituals — how bodies are buried, mourned and remembered — are changing due to, or even despite, state violence. In their place, new funeral traditions are emerging – such as dancing expressively, singing pop music and wearing color instead of black.
This shift offers a lens into how traditions change in subtle, overlooked ways to protest abuses of government power and mass violence by the state.
Farzam, 30, and Arshia, 27, were legends — always happy, smiling and making everybody laugh, remembered Ali. All three of them detested the current regime, the Islamic Republic of Iran led by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“Farzam always wanted freedom for Iran,” said Ali. “The Iranian people, the lives of the youth, a better tomorrow, Iran itself was what mattered to them.”
Farzam and Arshia were both from Jannat Abad, an attractive residential neighborhood in Tehran. The friends didn’t suffer from the financial problems motivating Iran’s unrest, but that didn’t stop them from protesting.
Ultimately, Farzam was shot three times, once each in the heart, the head and the leg, amidst the crack down by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the regime’s most powerful military-political institution.
On the day Farzam died, Ali was also protesting, but in a different city.
“[Regime forces] were shooting people with snipers, and assault rifles from close range,” Ali explained. “Right in front of our eyes, [IRGC forces] slit the carotid artery of one man’s neck and started dancing with the decapitated head. [They said] ‘Come on, you whores. Come on. Didn’t you want a revolution?’”
Many Iranians are suffering under the Islamic regime’s deadly crackdown, and, in turn, the funerals of protesters look different.
Traditionally, the only music at funerals is the nowhe – a rhythmic chant, telling painful stories about the Imams, intended to move people to tears as they grieve the deaths of Islamic religious figures.
But since the recent protests, Iranians have started dancing, while singing non-religious songs, finding new ways to grieve their loved ones.
“The dancing was intense,” Ali remembered. “The songs were sad songs…but they made you feel good.”
Video of singing at a funeral:
Ali Meghdari, a professor in Tehran who invented a body-washing device for funerals in Iran, said that in some cases, dancing and rhythmic clapping have been used to signal defiance, protest, or a celebration of freedom and identity.
“These acts are often read less as ‘joyful’ and more as expressions of collective emotion — grief mixed with resistance or solidarity,” explained Meghdari. “They can be controversial and are sometimes criticized by more conservative segments of society.”
In a typical Iranian funeral, Meghdari explained, “simplicity is emphasized; lavish displays are discouraged.”
Dancing, pop music – these rituals are a way of defying the regime’s ultra-conservative traditions, which regulate dancing and singing in public. In 2022, an engaged couple in their early 20s were each sentenced to five years in prison for a social media video of them dancing in a Tehran public square.
These traditions can be dangerous, and for one mother burying her son a few weeks ago, singing at his funeral felt too risky. Authorities gave her only an hour to bury him.
In Iran, after a person dies, multiple funeral ceremonies will be held on milestone days. The first ceremony occurs within 24 hours of the person’s death, the next is on the 3rd, 7th and 40th days after they died.
“It’s a milestone in closing the intensive mourning period and often involves a more formal ceremony with prayers, Quran recitation, and collective meals,” said Meghdari.
On the 40th day after Farzam’s and Arshia’s death, their loved ones plan to gather at Behesht-e Zahra cemetery. Typically, these mourners would gather and wear black and only after the fortieth day would they begin wearing color.
But everything is different now.
“We plan to wear white, dance, and chant slogans,” Ali said.
It is not just the funeral customs that have changed. Even retrieving a dead body of a protester in Iran is a highly dangerous process nowadays.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has repeatedly held bodies hostage and used them as leverage to keep families silent about the obvious and brutal cause of death.
Authorities can demand a “bullet price,” the fee often required for retrieving a protester’s body. Families who cannot afford the fee, which can reach up to $7,000, risk their relatives being buried anonymously in mass graves.
Other times, regime officials go so far as to bury bodies before notifying the family, or refuse to disclose where the remains are buried.
As reclaiming a dead body becomes riskier and more expensive, morgues, like cemeteries, have become sites of demonstration: families searching for the faces of their fallen loved ones mingle with protesters shouting “Death to Khamenei.”
Those who fear what could happen to the remains of their loved ones might avoid taking bodies to the morgue at all — many protesters, like Ali, worked to hide the dead bodies so they could not be taken to the morgue.
At the protest in Parand, where 135 people were arrested, Ali helped around 10 wounded people escape to safety and hid around 10 dead bodies in people’s homes and cars, to prevent the bodies going to the morgue.
When this nightmare ended, Ali was left reeling from what he had seen.
“I felt lost… I didn’t want to go home…I wanted to die but I couldn’t,” Ali said.
Today, Ali feels permanently changed:
“Life is no longer beautiful because I will never feel better. The scenes have become a nightmare for me every night. I can’t sleep, I’m restless, I’m lost, I’m wandering.”
Traditions also changed after Iran’s last massive wave of protests in 2022.
After Mahsa Amini, a 22-year old Kurdish woman beaten to death in police custody for not wearing a headscarf, women began revealing their hair in protest.
Women also started cutting their hair, an ancient pre-Islamic Iranian mourning ritual called ‘Gisuboran.’ This hair-cutting ritual was typically performed in private but was now happening at both funerals and protests.
Milestone days are important to Iranians after a death.
Protests re-erupted 40 days after Amini’s death in 2022.
This year, the regime’s biggest crackdown on protesters happened on the 8th and 9th of January 2026 – meaning the next round of protests may happen in just days.
*Ali’s name was changed in this story for security purposes.
DOGS OF LOVE:
These two sleepy pups were caught relaxing on the streets of Yerevan.
Stay safe out there!
Best,
Alessandra and Jacqueline
Devastating report on the situation in Iran. How terrible to read and to know you cannot do anything to help them.
I keep telling my older sister that I look forward to seeing the rebuild after all the destruction taking place around the world. Optimism is getting much thinner and harder to maintain, as we are confronted with people paying such a monstrous price. Sending peaceful prayers for all, in Ukraine, Iran, Taiwan, Venezuela, and everywhere in between.