The development has intensified questions about why a heritage with a thousand-year history is still awaiting submission.
Iran is the historical origin of the Damask rose, which spread during the Islamic centuries — especially in the Safavid era — to Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Bulgaria.
Saudi Arabia’s successful registration of its rose-related practices has triggered objections from Iranian cultural heritage experts who argue that Iran has been slow in safeguarding its own intangible heritage.
Alireza Izadi, Director-General for the Registration and Protection of Historical Monuments and the Preservation and Revival of Intangible and Natural Heritage, said the delay was due to efforts to enrich the rosewater file and add related rituals, which made the process time-consuming.
“We asked UNESCO for more time,” he said.
Izadi told IRNA that UNESCO conventions reject ownership-based approaches that could cause social tensions, adding, “If these matters were addressed from an ownership-focused perspective, the Cyrus Cylinder would not today be recognized as belonging to Iran, because it was discovered in what is now Iraq and has been kept in the British Museum for more than 70 years.”
“But its method, history and evidence identify it as belonging to Cyrus and the Iranian Empire.”
He noted that if origin alone determined registration, “Saudi Arabia would have objected to Iran’s registration of the ‘Iftar and its cultural and social traditions’ file,” or similar issues would have arisen with the Nowruz inscription now shared by 13 countries.
Izadi said Iran missed the “golden era of registration” in the 1980s and 1990s, a time when countries could submit numerous files without restrictions, but Iran was unable to do so because of key developments inside the country.
Despite this, he said that while Iran now ranks tenth in UNESCO listings, “the history of the world is unimaginable without Iran.”
IRNA