Maqbarat-ol-Shoara (Mausoleum of Poets)

Modernist concrete monument honouring more than 400 poets buried in Tabriz

The Maqbarat-ol-Shoara, or Mausoleum of Poets, is a striking modern monument in the Surkhab district that commemorates more than four hundred poets, mystics, and scholars buried in the old cemeteries of Tabriz. Among the most famous are Asadi Tusi, Qatran Tabrizi, and the modern Iranian poet Mohammad-Hossein Shahriar.

The structure itself, completed in 1971, is a series of interlocking concrete arches that frame an internal hall with the symbolic graves. It's an unusual and powerful piece of late-modernist architecture in a country better known for its tile-domed mosques. Worth the short taxi ride from the centre.

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The site is built over the Surkhab Cemetery, where the great 14th-century poet Khaqani and the Sufi master Shams Tabrizi's contemporaries were laid to rest. Successive earthquakes destroyed the old gravestones, so in the 1970s the architect Gholamreza Farzanmehr proposed the present soaring brutalist canopy — a deliberate break with the traditional Persian funerary mausoleum.

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