Parnia Abbasi: Poet and Teacher Killed Ten Days Before Her 24th Birthday

Parnia Abbasi was a poet, an English teacher, and an employee at Bank Melli Iran. She held a degree in language translation from the International University of Qazvin and had recently been accepted into a master’s program in management. However, she chose not to pursue further studies in order to keep her job.

Maryam, one of Parnia’s closest friends, says that the widely circulated photo in Iranian media, showing a woman’s hair emerging from beneath rubble beside a pink mattress, belongs to Parnia.

Parnia came from an ordinary, loving family. Her father was a retired educator, and her mother had also retired from Bank Melli Iran. On the first morning of the war, a Friday, Parnia was supposed to meet Maryam near her home at 11:00 a.m. But after the attack, when Maryam arrived, she found that Parnia’s building, Orkideh Complex on Sattar Khan Street, near the gas station, had been completely destroyed. The building had ten units; floors three through five were obliterated. It appears that all the residents of those upper floors were killed.

Maryam witnessed Parnia’s body being pulled from the rubble, followed shortly by that of her younger brother, Parham, born in 2009 and still a student. Rescue workers told her they were unable to recover the bodies of Parnia’s parents immediately, as they needed heavy equipment to remove the debris.

According to witnesses, the central part of the building was directly hit, leading to its collapse. “Other residents died in that same building,” Maryam said. “The photo of the pink mattress stained with blood was taken from that very place.”

Parnia once wrote in a poem published in the magazine Weight of the World:

“In a thousand places
I will end
I will burn
I will become a silent star
that will smoke in your sky…”