TEHRAN – Iran’s Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Tourism, and Handicrafts has established a range of criteria to step up efforts to safeguard Gorgan, which is most famous for a defensive wall from almost 1,500 years earlier.On Saturday, the tourism ministry submitted a letter to Golestan province’s Governor-General Ali-Mohammad Zanganeh in which it declared a range of criteria for safeguarding, protecting, and restoring the historical core of Gorgan, CHTN reported.Gorgan, formerly Astarabad, is situated along a small tributary of the Qareh River, 37 kilometers from the Caspian Sea.The ancient town for long suffered from inroads of the Turkmen tribes who occupied the plain north of the Qareh River and were subjected to incessant Qajar-Turkmen tribal conflicts in the 19th century according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.Its ruined defensive barrier named “ the Great Wall of Gorgan” stretch for almost 200 kilometers.

It was constructed from 420s CE to 530s as a northern frontier of the then mighty Persian Empire, which was then ruled under Sassanids.The massive barrier faced a series of wars first against the Hephthalites or White Huns and later against the Turks.

Most parts of the gigantic monument are still hidden underneath the surface some segments have so far been unearthed and even restored to former glory.The Great Wall of Gorgan is more than three times the length of the longest late Roman defensive wall built from scratch, the Anastasian Wall west of Constantinople.

The combined area of the forts on the Gorgan Wall exceeds that of those on Hadrian’s Wall about threefold.AFM