This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Iran's Islamic Revolution of 1979 brought sudden persecution to the country's Zoroastrian minority. Muslim revolutionaries entered the main Zoroastrian fire temple in Tehran and replaced a portrait of Zoroaster with one of Ayatollah Khomeini, a single act that announced how far the new state's tolerance for the old Persian faith would extend.
The revolution's effect on the community was severe: contemporary accounts describe it as equally traumatic for Zoroastrians as for Iran's other religious minorities, and describe the community's numbers as reduced drastically in its wake, though no precise count survives from the years just before the revolution to measure the fall against.
Official recognition did not disappear entirely. Zoroastrians kept the single parliamentary seat reserved for their community since Iran's 1906 constitution, a protection that predated the revolution by more than seventy years and that the new Islamic Republic left in place even as it curtailed the community in other ways.
What the years after 1979 changed for Zoroastrianism in Iran was survival under narrower terms rather than disappearance. Iran's 2012 census counted 25,271 Zoroastrians, a rise of 27.5 percent over the 2006 count, evidence that a community battered by revolution was nonetheless still growing rather than vanishing decades later.