Tombeau de Nader Chah

Nader Shah, born in 1688 north of Mashhad and shah of Iran from 1736, made Mashhad his capital^2,4. In 1732-33, while still governor of Khorasan, he built himself a tomb in the Bala-Khiaban quarter; no plan survives, but its endowment deed, kept at the Astan Quds Razavi library, points to a luxurious building in a garden². In 1738-39 he invaded India and took Delhi^2,4. He was killed by his own officers in June 1747 and buried in Mashhad, in the tomb he had built for himself and his son Reza Qoli Mirza^1,2,4. Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar later had the tomb razed and the bones placed under the threshold of his palace in Tehran¹.

In 1917-18 the governor of Khorasan, Ahmad Qavam, had the bones brought back from Tehran and a brick tomb built over them, but damp later ruined it^1,3. After the coup of August 1953 the Society for National Heritage took up the Shah’s order for a worthy tomb, and in May 1955 it set up a commission, which chose Houshang Seyhoun for the building and Abolhassan Sadighi for the statue¹. The technical council of Tehran University’s Faculty of Fine Arts and then the Shah approved their designs¹. Work began in late 1956 under the supervision of Mohsen Foroughi and Hossein Joudat and ended in 1961-62, and the Shah inaugurated the complex on 1 April 1963¹.

Seyhoun based the design on two shapes, the square and the triangle, and built it of large blocks of granite, described as a sign of Nader’s ‘firmness and greatness’¹; Visit Iran says the stone came from the mountains around Mashhad³. Because the soil was weak, the tomb and the statue rest on a thick raft of reinforced concrete¹. The complex groups a tomb hall with two museum halls, one for weapons of Nader’s time and one for earlier weapons, and a tall tower designed together with the statue group so that Nader seems to surge from the tower towards the museum¹. According to Esmaili and his co-authors, the design drew on the Tarikhaneh mosque at Damghan¹.

The bronze group, 6.5 m high, shows Nader on a rearing horse, followed on foot by a trumpeter, a flag-bearer and a musketeer, with two large panels in half relief¹. Sadighi made the model, the Bruni foundry in Rome cast it, and it was shipped from Livorno and set on its tall granite base on 8 November 1960¹. Visit Iran describes three linked porches on the east, south and west sides of the main building, and a garden laid out on the pattern of the Persian garden, enclosed by a granite wall and iron railings with a battle-axe motif³.

The tomb hall is square: two walls of red stone close it on two sides, and two open colonnades form the other two¹. Nader’s gravestone lies in the corner sheltered by the walls; Seyhoun wrote that this corner and the open sides evoke attack and defence, the red colour war, and the stone projections on the walls Nader’s battles¹. Each column has a square base and a square top turned 45 degrees to each other, producing eight triangular faces that recall Nader’s hat¹. The roof recalls the nomad’s tent in which Nader was born and killed, and Visit Iran says the gravestone was carved on the model of the Darya-ye Nur diamond that Nader brought back from India^1,3.