The Palace That Remembers

A City Built to Last

The archaeological site of Susa — ancient Shushan — sits in the Khuzestan province of modern Iran, where the Dez and Karkheh rivers converge. For over four thousand years, this was one of the most important cities in the known world. The Elamites built it. The Achaemenids crowned it. The Megillah set its most famous story here.

Today, the palace of Darius stands in partial ruin — columns truncated, walls dissolved into the earth. But the layout is still legible. The great Apadana hall, where Ahasuerus held his 180-day feast, can still be traced in the foundations. The inner court where Esther stood uninvited is not a metaphor. It was a room.

What the Stones Remember

The palace complex at Susa was excavated primarily by French archaeologist Marcel-Auguste Dieulafoy in the late 19th century. What he found — glazed brick panels of winged lions, archers of the Immortals, griffins in lapis and gold — now fills an entire wing of the Louvre. The originals left Shushan. But the ground remembers where they stood.

For the heritage traveler, this is the tension that makes Susa extraordinary. The artifacts are dispersed across museums worldwide. But the site itself — the tell, the foundations, the spatial memory of a court that ruled from India to Ethiopia — remains in place. You cannot see the glazed bricks in Susa. But you can stand where they were mounted and feel the scale of what they decorated.

Reading the Megillah on Location

There is a particular quality to reading a text in the place where it happened. The Megillah describes “Shushan the capital” with the casual specificity of a story set in a real city — the king’s gate, the inner court, the royal garden, the city square. These are not symbolic locations. They are architectural features of a palace complex that archaeologists have mapped.

To read the Megillah at Susa is to realize that the reversals of Purim happened in rooms. Not on battlefields, not in temples, but in corridors and courtyards where proximity to power was measured in footsteps. The palace remembers this. The question is whether we are willing to listen.