Makam Firdausi

Ferdowsi, author of the Persian epic Shahnameh, died at Tus between about 1020 and 1026; the exact year is disputed^2,3. According to Nezami Aruzi, writing in the twelfth century, a preacher of the town refused him burial in the Muslim cemetery, so he was buried in his own garden inside Tabaran, near the Razan gate^1,2. A small dome “ornamented with lacquered tiles” still stood over the grave in 1822 but had gone by 1883, when Abd al-Wahhab Khan Asaf al-Dowleh, governor of Khorasan, located the tomb and began a brick structure that he never finished¹. The Society for National Heritage (Anjoman-e Asar-e Melli), founded in 1922, made the mausoleum its first major project⁴.

The Zoroastrian deputy Arbab Keikhosrow Shahrokh was sent to Tus to fix the site, which he did from literary sources, the ruins of Tus and the memories of old residents who recalled Asaf al-Dowleh’s building, and work began in 1928 under his supervision^1,8. Designs by Ernst Herzfeld and Karim Taherzadeh Behzad were set aside in favour of a plan and plaster model by André Godard; when its pyramid roof cracked, Taherzadeh Behzad designed the stepped roof that replaced it^1,8,9. Reza Shah inaugurated the mausoleum in October 1934, during the celebrations of Ferdowsi’s millennium^6,8. Because of settlement and water damage, the monument was taken down and rebuilt on a new basement by Houshang Seyhoun in 1964-1968⁷.

The monument follows the tomb of Cyrus the Great at Pasargadae, a chamber raised on a stepped base, and dresses it with engaged columns taken from the Achaemenid rock-cut tombs of Persepolis^5,8. The builders Hossein Hajjarbashi Zanjani and Hossein Lorzadeh used dressed marble from a quarry near Mashhad; the square chamber, 16 m a side, stands on an outer stepped platform of the same stone¹. Four tall columns with double-headed bull capitals rise at the corners and carry a heavily ornamented stepped cornice¹. A winged figure on the upper part of the south wall, popularly called the Faravahar, recalls Achaemenid art, and most of the inscriptions, engraved by Hasan Zarrinkhatt, are verses from the Shahnameh^1,10.

Seyhoun kept the outer form but turned the small, dark room of the tomb into a hall of about 900 m² beneath the monument, reached by stone staircases on either side^1,7. He restored the reflecting pool, enlarged the garden on all sides to 56,753 m² and added visitor buildings, among them a restaurant, a library and a tea house meant for Shahnameh recitals, built of raw, off-form concrete with serrated skylights^1,7. The tea house became a museum in 1982; after several changes of use, it was decided in 2003 to restore it, with Behrouz Ahmadi as project architect, for displays on the Shahnameh⁷. A statue of the poet stands southeast of the monument, and in 2020 the singer Mohammad-Reza Shajarian was buried beside the tea house^1,7.

Stone staircases on both sides of the monument lead down into Seyhoun’s hall, created by hollowing out the solid floor of the original chamber and extending the space beneath it on all sides^1,7. Its walls carry stone reliefs of scenes from the Shahnameh alongside inscriptions of the poem’s verses^1,7. At the centre, four pairs of columns frame a two-stepped marble platform carrying the cenotaph, a marble slab about 150 by 100 cm and about 50 cm high^1,7.