Marjan (lion)

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Marjan ( Persian مرجان Mardschān , DMG Marǧān , ‚Koralle ', * 1976 ; † January 25, 2002 ) was a popular lion in the Kabul Zoo .

Life

Marjan was born in 1976 in Cologne Zoo and was brought to Afghanistan as a gift in 1978, where he lived with his partner Chucha .

The Kabul Zoo felt the effects of the civil war and the war against the USSR , but it was not closed. In 1993 a soldier was killed by Marjan after he had climbed into the lion enclosure during a test of courage and petted the lioness Chucha. The victim's brother threw a grenade into the cage in revenge the following day, which exploded and seriously injured Marjan. The lion survived the attack, but he lost his hearing, one eye and his teeth.

During the rule of the Taliban , who for a while planned to kill all animals in the zoo, Marjan was pelted with stones once in 1996. After the bombing and the subsequent conquest of Kabul by US troops, Marjan and the zoo became world famous and received donations from all over the world. The lion eventually died of organ failure.

Effects

Throughout his life, Marjan was considered a "symbol of the Afghan people's will to survive" and embodied the decline and destruction of Afghanistan through the wars of the last decades for Afghans and worldwide, which Marjan survived as one of only nineteen animals in the zoo. Marjan's death came as a shock to many Afghans. The Chinese government donated a pair of lions as a replacement to the zoo as a "sign of friendship". The Militarization Information criticized by Marjan death as the fate of the lion was staged in the media and that his death had been depicted tragic "than the all killed Taliban who were indeed previously sufficiently demonized".

Khaled Hosseini mentions Marjan in his novel Kite Runner , which was published in 2003 and filmed in 2007.

A lion that has lived in the Kabul Zoo since 2014 was also given the name Marjan in memory of its conspecifics .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Chinese lions for Kabul on spiegel.de
  2. ↑ See the obituary A Tribute to Marjan, the One-Eyed Lion
  3. ↑ Christoph Marischka: "The power of interpretation of the political elite". Politics and the media in the “war on terror” . Tübingen 2002, p. 17 (PDF; 445 kB)
  4. ↑ Lion Mardschan is a new attraction in the Kabul Zoo on welt.de.

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