Mashhad: Iran‘s Holy City

Mashhad is a city in northeast Iran, known as a place of religious pilgrimage. It’s centered on the vast Holy Shrine of Imam Reza, with golden domes and minarets that are floodlit at night. The circular complex also contains the tomb of Lebanese scholar Sheikh Bahai, plus the 15th-century, tile-fronted Goharshad Mosque, with a turquoise dome. Museums within the shrine include the Carpet Museum, with many rare pieces.

Mashhad is a multiethnic city that includes Persians, Baluchis, Daris, Hazrajatis, Turkmen, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kurds, and Lurs among its residents. This reflects its history at the crossroads of Central Asia and the Silk Road in an ancient region known as Khorosan. The dominant ethnic groups today are Persians, followed by Turkmen, and Kurds.

During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979–89 and following the American invasion of that country in 2001, hundreds of thousands of Afghans fled to Iran, especially to Khorāsān and Mashhad, to escape from war zones.

The city was governed by different ethnic groups over the course of its history. Mashhad was previously a small village, which by the 9th century had been known as Sanabad, and which was located — along with Tus and other villages—on the ancient Silk Road connecting them with Merv to the east.

Mashhad would eventually outgrow all its surrounding villages. It gained its current name meaning “place of martyrdom” in reference to the Imam Reza shrine, where the eighth Shia Imam, Ali al-Rida, is buried. The Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid is also buried within the same shrine. The shrine is an important place of pilgrimage, visited by 25 million people each year in what is often described as “the holiest city in Iran”.

Mashhad later also became associated with Ferdowsi, the Persian poet and author of the Shahnameh, who was born in Tus (with many institutions in Mashhad named after him).

Mashhad enjoyed relative prosperity in the Mongol period, and continued to grow. Between 1736 and 1796, Mashhad became the capital of Afsharid Iran which was ruled by the Afsharid dynasty founded by Nader Shah, known as Persia’s Napoleon ,whose tomb is located in the city.

In the modern era, Mashhad continued to expand and became the hometown of some of the most significant literary figures and artists of modern Iran, such as the poet Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, and the traditional Iranian singer and composer Mohammad-Reza Shajarian. On 30 October 2009 (the anniversary of Imam Reza’s martyrdom), Iran’s then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared Mashhad to be “Iran’s spiritual capital”.

Destination : Iran