Tus, Iran

The air out here is dry and clean, and the light falls hard and white across the plain. Underfoot, the paths are pale stone, warm by midday. Somewhere a sprinkler ticks across a lawn. To the north and east, low brown mounds rise from the fields... and those mounds are the remains of a city. You are standing in Tus, a short drive northwest of Mashhad. For centuries this was one of the great cities of Khorasan, the old eastern province of the Persian world.

That name, Khorasan, means roughly "where the sun rises." It once covered a huge region, reaching across parts of today's Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. Tus sat on routes that carried traders, scholars, and armies between the Iranian plateau and the cities further east. Today it feels quiet. But for a long stretch of the medieval period, Tus was the regional centre. The shrine city of Mashhad, now the giant next door, grew up as its smaller neighbour.

Here is the first surprise. Mashhad began as a village called Sanabad, close to Tus. In the early ninth century, the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid died in this area. A few years later, Imam Reza, the eighth imam of Shia Islam, was buried nearby. His shrine drew pilgrims, and the settlement around it grew. In time, the shrine town overtook the old city. So the story of Mashhad begins, in a sense, right here.

Most visitors come to Tus for one man. His name is Ferdowsi, and he was born near here in the tenth century. He spent decades writing the Shahnameh, the Book of Kings. It is a vast poem that tells the history of Iran, from the creation of the world to the Arab conquest in the seventh century. It is usually counted at around fifty thousand couplets. That makes it one of the longest poems ever written by a single author.

Why does this poem matter so much? Ferdowsi wrote in Persian at a time when Arabic dominated learning and religion. He chose words with Persian roots, and he kept the language alive in a grand literary form. Many Iranians say that Ferdowsi saved their language. His heroes — the warrior Rostam, the tragic prince Siavash, the doomed son Sohrab — are still household names. People quote his lines at weddings and in arguments alike.

Now look at the monument in front of you. The mausoleum is built of pale stone, with a stepped base and a squared, solid body. If it reminds you of something much older, that is deliberate. The design draws on the tomb of Cyrus the Great at Pasargadae, a sixth-century-BCE monument in southern Iran. Cyrus founded the first Persian empire, so the architects linked the poet to the deep roots of Iranian identity.

The tomb has its own history. The first modern mausoleum was built in the 1930s, around the thousandth anniversary of the poet's birth. It was later rebuilt and enlarged in the decades that followed. On the upper face of the monument you can see a winged figure. This is the Faravahar, an ancient Zoroastrian symbol, from the faith of pre-Islamic Iran. Around the walls, carved verses from the Shahnameh run in clear Persian script.

There is a story about Ferdowsi's death that locals love to tell, so treat it as legend, not record. According to the tale, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni promised the poet gold for his epic but sent silver instead. Ferdowsi was insulted. Years later, the sultan regretted it and sent a caravan of riches to Tus. As the gold entered one city gate, so the story goes, the poet's coffin left by another.

Another account, told by a medieval writer, says that a local preacher refused to allow Ferdowsi a burial in the Muslim cemetery. So the poet was buried in his own garden, inside the walls of Tus. Whether every detail is true, the idea has stayed with the place. Today the tomb still sits within a garden. Rows of trees, flowerbeds, and long pools of water give it a calm, almost domestic feeling.

Walk inside the lower chamber, below the tomb itself. Here the walls are covered with carved stone panels showing scenes from the Shahnameh. Look for Rostam wrestling monsters, riding his horse Rakhsh, and standing over his fallen son Sohrab. The father-and-son tragedy is the most painful story in the poem. Rostam only learns who the young warrior is after he has dealt the fatal blow. Many Iranian visitors stop longest in front of that panel.

Tus gave the world more than one poet. Nizam al-Mulk, the powerful vizier of the Seljuk sultans in the eleventh century, came from this area. So did the theologian al-Ghazali, one of the most influential thinkers in Islamic history. In the thirteenth century, the astronomer and scholar Nasir al-Din Tusi was born here too. His name — Tusi — simply means "from Tus." For one small city, that is a remarkable list.

Tus did not survive the Mongol invasions in good shape. The city was badly damaged in the early thirteenth century, and later attacks finished much of the work. Slowly, people moved to Mashhad. Out beyond the garden, you can still see the remains of the old city walls and a large earthen mound. A short distance away stands a domed brick building known as Haruniyeh. Its origins are debated, but its brick dome rises over the flat plain.

As you walk, notice who is here with you. Families spread out on the grass. School groups recite lines from memory. Older visitors stand quietly at the tomb, sometimes reading verses aloud. For many Iranians, this is not a museum visit. It is closer to a pilgrimage of language. The small museum on the grounds adds old manuscripts, objects from the ruined city, and more art inspired by the epic.

Before you leave, stand for a moment at the edge of the pools. Look back at the pale stone tomb against the sky, and then out at the mounds of the lost city. A thousand years ago, one man sat somewhere near here, writing line after line in his own language. The city fell. The poem did not. Listen to the voices around you. Some of them are still speaking his words.