Most people's relationship with pigeons is pretty simple. People tend to see them as these

annoying birds that want to come and eat your crumbs, get too close, maybe poop on your car.

I happen to like pigeons. I think they're strangely beautiful and one roosted outside of my window once and I got to see it feed its little hatchlings and I don't know I find them strange and charming birds

which is in fact how people used to feel about them.

Because hundreds of years ago, in Iran,

the relationship between man and pigeon

was actually quite cooperative, symbiotic even. Humans gave pigeons food and a place to rest, and pigeons in

turn contributed to the nearby farms. And although a lot has changed since then, this unique human pigeon rapport continues to provide inspiration, even today.

You could kind of start imagining a society that has a very different relationship with animals where it's no longer like, you know, there's human society and there's animals that are separate from us like you could start kind of imagining a very different world

than the one we have now. I'm Dylan Thuris and this is Atlas Obscira, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible,

and wondrous places.

And today, we are going to Isfahan Iran and we will learn the history of

these incredible now-defunct structures called pigeon towers.

More. called pigeon towers. More after this. The Bijon Towers were spread all throughout Iran. The towers are a sandy beige and they're really big.

They go up to six stories tall and 30 feet wide.

Typically they're made of a brick plastered with mud.

And even at first glance, they're kind of striking.

They basically are just this constantly repeating pattern of these small little cubbyholes that are perfectly patterns so that they take up all of the space possible so it's almost like being in a

circular honeycomb. That's Aaron Van der Jin. He is a researcher and a writer with a natural resource sciences degree.

He's written about the pigeon towers.

From the outside, these towers kind of look like the corners of a fortress.

They're a conical shape which rounds up at the top.

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