Graftombe van Attar

Farid al-Din Attar, a Persian poet and Sufi, was born in Nishapur about 1145-46 and kept a pharmacy there, the trade his name refers to^1,5. Encyclopaedia Iranica says he was killed in the Mongol massacre of the city in April 1221⁵. His tomb lies in the old Shadyakh quarter, south-east of the modern city^3,7. The Mir’at al-Mamalik, a travel account written in 1556-57, already mentions visits to the graves of Sheikh Attar and of Imamzadeh Mohammad Mahruq, the shrine beside which Omar Khayyam’s tomb now stands³. Ali-Shir Nava’i built over the grave in the reign of the Timurid sultan Husayn Bayqara, and in 1496-97 he ordered the decayed tombs repaired^4,7.

Under Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar a governor of Khorasan planned a new building over the grave, but unrest in the country stopped it¹. In 1958 the Society for National Heritage, then building Nader Shah’s tomb in Mashhad, decided at the Shah’s wish to start building the tombs of Khayyam, Attar and the painter Kamal-ol-Molk to Houshang Seyhoun’s designs, so that the Shah could open them together with Nader’s². An inscription on the new gateway of the Imamzadeh garden lists Attar’s tomb among the works restored, rebuilt or completed under Seyhoun between 1959 and 1968³; Encyclopaedia Iranica counts the work on it as a repair⁶. Visit Iran says it took its present form then and was partly restored again in the 1990s¹.

The tomb is an octagonal domed chamber⁴. Outside, entrance iwans on the main axes alternate with semi-octagonal niches, under a bulbous double dome on a high drum⁷. Photographs taken in 1908-09 show the building without any exterior tilework and without the outer shell of the dome⁷. Bernard O’Kane notes that a single chamber is not what the khanqah described by the chronicler Khvandamir would lead one to expect, and that it is much smaller than the domed chambers Ali-Shir Nava’i built at Langar and Azadan: both are arguments against a Timurid date⁷. According to Archnet, the tilework of the exterior and the layout of the garden date from the restoration of the 1960s⁴.

The tomb stands in a garden that also holds the tomb of the painter Kamal-ol-Molk, designed by Seyhoun; Visit Iran points out how closely the two buildings match, so that they read as parts of one complex¹. In the same programme of the 1960s a tree-lined avenue with three roundabouts was laid out to link Attar’s tomb with Omar Khayyam’s³. The composer Parviz Meshkatian is also buried in the garden¹.

When O’Kane recorded the building in 1975, four windows above a tall dado alternated inside with shallow semi-octagonal niches, and the dome rose on smooth pendentives⁷. The grave is marked by an elaborate Timurid tombstone⁴. It is a tablet attached to an octagonal shaft: blessings on the twelve imams run round the top of the shaft, the date 891 AH (1486) is cut in figures on its back, and the 28-line inscription on the tablet, mostly a Persian poem, praises Attar, names Sultan Husayn and Ali-Shir Nava’i, and ends with the name of its maker, Muhyi al-Din ibn Kamal al-Din⁷. O’Kane notes that what the poem says about Attar’s death cannot be reconciled with the Mongol sack of 1221⁷.