Ahar · IR

Sheikh Shahabaddin Ahari Tomb

In the old town of Ahar, in Iran's East Azerbaijan province, the domed shrine of Sheikh Shahab al-Din Ahari rises over the grave of one of the region's most celebrated poet-mystics. The mausoleum is at once a Sufi lodge, a mosque, a tomb and—since the 1990s—a small museum devoted to Persian literature and mysticism, which gives visitors a rare chance to step inside a living monument of Azerbaijani Iranian architecture. The building grew in layers rather than all at once. Its first core was a khanqah—a gathering house for Sufi devotion—raised in the Ilkhanid centuries, and it was enlarged and embellished under the early Safavids, when Shah Abbas I is recorded as a keen patron of Ahar. The result is a single, harmonious complex whose brick iwans, octagonal dome, minarets and tilework carry several hundred years of Iranian building history in one courtyard.