Our summer lecture programme is now over.  The autumn programme, which will have a Central Asian theme, will begin on Friday 17th October.  Details will be confirmed early in September. The programme will also include the Trust’s contribution to the Cambridge Festival of Ideas on Friday 24th October. Lectures will take place as usual on Fridays and begin at 5.30pm, with refreshments from 5pm.

The latest issue of our newsletter focuses on recent events and developments at the Trust and includes an interview with our new Honorary Fellow Professor Maria Macuch by Almut Hintze and an illustrated article by Ursula Sims-Williams on the exhibition The Everlasting Flame: Zoroastrianism in History and Imagination, a major exhibition at SOAS co-curated by two of our Trustees and to which the Trust lent a number of items. We hope you enjoy this issue. Please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any suggestions for news items …

Over 120 people attended the Trust’s annual Summer Garden Party on Sunday 1st June.  The weather was unusually kind!

Friday Lectures – Easter Term 2014, 23 May: Touraj Daryaee (UCI), ‘The Sasanian Empire as a Garden: The Walls and Rivers of the Sasanian Empire’ This lecture looks at the physical and ideological boundaries which the Sasanians created for the idea of Iranshahr. In this late antique construct, inside the empire, protected by walls and rivers was imagined as a garden where order and beauty was in existence. Outside of the walls and the rivers it was seen as place of wilderness and disorder. This binary division was at the centre …

Don’t Forget: This Friday’s lecture at AIIT is by Nina Mirnig on The Religious Centre of Pashupatinah: Early Nepalese Shaiva Inscriptions in Context.  Refreshments from 5pm, lecture begins at 5.30pm – all welcome!