The Iranian dissident Karim Keshavrz spent 14 months on Khārg Island (ﺨﺎﺮﮒ) in the 1950s as a political prisoner. He recorded his observations about the island in a work titled Chahardah mah dar khark [Fourteen months on Khark] (Tehran 1363 (1984-85). The Khargi spoke Persian and belonged to the Sunni sect of Islam. (p. 42). “Most people of the island and the coasts of the gulf,” he wrote, “call the island Kharg, with a g in Persian, not Khārk…. The current pronunciation of the toponym has been preserved in people’s parlance there.” (p. 23). The Khargi lemons that were found in Shiraz and other parts of the Iranian south derived from this island, even though by 1953-54 there had been no trace of any lemon tree on the island. (p. 23). A similar fruity connection between Kharg and the mainland is made in the suggestion that the island’s name could be connected to khārak, a local Khargi word for a date fruit that is still on the palm tree and is just right to eat.[1] However, in Tehran, the term khāraki indicated an unripe date.[2]

The name Kharg is related to the spelling of the name as Khārag (and Khārgu) that appeared in the India Government’s Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf,[3] although for the most of the pre-20th century and since then the variant Khark was in vogue among Persian/Moslem writers.[4] While it is likely ku in Khārku identifies the island as junior (kuchek) to Khark, the form gu as in Khārgu cannot be easily dismissed as having nothing to do with fisheries (see below), because of names like rāshgu (Eleutheronema tetradactylum), a fish caught around Kharg[5] and maygu, a general Persian reference to shrimp and prawn. In this vein, it is plausible that the name Khark and Kharku related to a type of fish that the Khargi call seh khārak.[6]

Another theory looks for the origin of the toponym Kharg in khāreh or khārā, meaning “hard rock.”[7] Tying into this suggestion is the description of the island by the geographer Yakut al-Hamawi (1179-1229) as “a tall mountain in the middle of the sea.”[8] This certainly plays into the name of the variant for the lesser island Khārku, in which ku certainly elicits a Persian connection to kuh (“mountain”), as gu elicits a connection to gāh (a place suffix). 

The most likely explanation of Khargu is that the name is made of khār and gu. In Persian, the word khār refers to thorn, thistle. Keshavarz made a detailed observation about the abundance of polypier in and around this coralline island; he described the “marine fossils” as being like “stony flowers” and found them everywhere in the cracks between rocks be they on the shore or at “the highest elevations of the island’s mountains.”[9]

For an excellent digest of a few  works about the Kharg Island, see https://globisreview.com/kharg-from-a-fiery-exile-to-the-cool-calm-of-a-treasure-island/ (accessed: March 14, 2026).