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Behesht-e Zahra

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A Nation's History Written in Stone

In 2025, satellite imagery revealed something troubling in the southern reaches of Tehran. Lot 41 of Behesht-e Zahra cemetery—where victims of mass executions following the 1979 Iranian Revolution had been buried—was being paved over and converted into a parking lot.

This single act of erasure tells you everything about why this cemetery matters. Behesht-e Zahra is not merely Iran's largest burial ground. It is a contested archive of the country's turbulent modern history, where the powerful and the persecuted alike have been laid to rest, sometimes just meters apart.

The Cemetery That Ate Tehran

The name means "Paradise of Zahra," a reference to Fatimah al-Zahra, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad and one of the most revered figures in Shia Islam. The cemetery sprawls across the dusty plains south of Tehran, connected to the metropolis by Line 1 of the Tehran Metro—making death, in a practical sense, quite accessible to the city's millions.

Before Behesht-e Zahra existed, Tehran's dead were scattered across numerous smaller cemeteries throughout the capital. By the early 1950s, urban planners recognized that a city growing as rapidly as Tehran needed a different approach. The solution was to consolidate: replace the patchwork of burial grounds with several large cemeteries beyond the city's expanding edges.

Construction began in the late 1960s, and on June 29, 1970, Mayor Gholamreza Nikpey officially opened the gates. The cemetery was positioned on the road toward Qom, Iran's holiest city and the center of Shia religious learning. This was no accident. Every funeral procession heading south was symbolically traveling toward the sacred.

The Martyrs' Section

What transformed Behesht-e Zahra from a large municipal cemetery into a site of national significance was the Iran-Iraq War, which raged from 1980 to 1988. This was one of the bloodiest conflicts of the twentieth century, leaving somewhere between half a million and a million dead on both sides. The exact toll remains disputed, partly because both governments had reasons to obscure it.

For Iran, the war dead were not casualties—they were martyrs. The distinction matters enormously in Shia Islam, where martyrdom carries profound spiritual significance dating back to the death of Imam Hussein at the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE. A martyr who dies defending the faith is believed to enter paradise directly.

The martyrs' section of Behesht-e Zahra became hallowed ground. Families would visit not with the somber grief typical of Western cemeteries, but with a complex mixture of sorrow and pride. The graves became sites of pilgrimage, decorated with photographs of young men—many of them teenagers—who had answered the call to defend the Islamic Republic.

The Old Regime's Resting Place

Walk through Behesht-e Zahra and you encounter a peculiar phenomenon: the enemies of history lying side by side. Here rest members of the Qajar dynasty, which ruled Iran from 1789 to 1925. Princess Ezzosaltaneh Qajar, daughter of Naser al-Din Shah, died in 1984, having lived long enough to see not one but two revolutions sweep away the world she was born into.

Near her lie members of the Pahlavi dynasty that overthrew the Qajars. Prince Hamid-Reza Pahlavi, the youngest son of Reza Shah, died in 1992. His father had seized power in a coup, crowned himself, and attempted to transform Iran into a modern secular nation-state. His son Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi—the last Shah—died in exile in Egypt and is buried in Cairo, but other members of his family returned to Iranian soil in death if not in life.

Esmat Dowlatshahi, one of Reza Shah's wives, died in 1995 and was buried at Behesht-e Zahra. One wonders what she made of the Islamic Republic that had overthrown her stepson, executed many of her family's associates, and transformed everything her husband had tried to build.

The Executed Prime Minister

Perhaps the most symbolically charged grave belongs to Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, who served as Prime Minister of Iran from 1965 to 1977—the longest-serving prime minister in Iranian history. When the revolution came, Hoveyda could have fled. He chose to stay, reportedly believing that his years of service and relatively moderate reputation would protect him.

He was wrong.

On April 7, 1979, barely two months after the Shah's departure, Hoveyda was executed following a revolutionary tribunal that lasted just a few hours. The charges included "spreading corruption on earth" and "fighting God"—phrases with deep roots in Islamic jurisprudence but applied with revolutionary elasticity.

His body was brought to Behesht-e Zahra. Today he lies in the same cemetery as many of the revolutionaries who ordered his death, and not far from the soldiers who died defending the system he had served.

The Generals

The section containing military officers reads like a chronicle of Iran's transformation from American ally to revolutionary state and back to regional power. Here you find generals of the Imperial Iranian Army, men who wore uniforms designed to echo Western military traditions and who trained with American advisors.

Nematollah Nassiri, who directed SAVAK—the Shah's feared secret police—from 1965 to 1978, was executed in 1979 and buried here. SAVAK had become synonymous with torture and political repression, and Nassiri was among the first senior officials to face revolutionary justice.

But also buried here are generals of the Islamic Republic of Iran Army—sometimes the very same military, now renamed and reoriented. The Iran-Iraq War forced the new regime to rely on professional soldiers, many of whom had served under the Shah. Some, like Valiollah Fallahi, chief of staff of the Islamic Republic's army who died in 1981, made the transition and gave their lives for the new order.

Fighter pilots from both eras share this ground. Jalil Zandi, who died in 2001, was the only ace of the Iran-Iraq War, credited with shooting down eleven Iraqi aircraft. He flew American-made F-14 Tomcats—purchased by the Shah, inherited by the revolutionaries, and flown against Soviet-equipped Iraqi jets. The ironies of Cold War geopolitics made strange bedfellows in the skies over Mesopotamia.

The Revolutionaries Who Became the Establishment

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini himself is buried not at Behesht-e Zahra but at a massive mausoleum complex nearby, his tomb having become a pilgrimage site rivaling the shrines of ancient saints. But many of his closest associates lie in the cemetery proper.

Mohammad Beheshti, who served as chief justice and led the Islamic Republic Party, was killed in the bombing of party headquarters in June 1981—an attack that killed over seventy senior officials. The perpetrators were likely the Mojahedin-e Khalq, a leftist Islamist group that had initially supported the revolution before breaking violently with Khomeini's faction.

Mohammad-Ali Rajaei served as both prime minister and president in 1981—the only person in Iranian history to hold both offices. He was president for less than a month before another bomb, again attributed to the Mojahedin, killed him along with Prime Minister Mohammad-Javad Bahonar.

This wave of assassinations in 1981 eliminated much of the revolutionary leadership's first generation. The survivors—men like Ali Khamenei, who would become Supreme Leader after Khomeini's death—learned lessons about security and control that shaped the Islamic Republic for decades.

The Dissidents

Here the cemetery becomes most poignant and most troubling. Buried at Behesht-e Zahra are dissidents of every era and ideology: Marxists who fought the Shah and were executed, Marxists who survived the Shah only to be imprisoned or killed by the Islamic Republic, liberals who dreamed of democracy, and protesters who simply wanted change.

Bijan Jazani, a Marxist theoretician and founder of the Organization of Iranian People's Fedai Guerrillas, was killed in 1975—officially while trying to escape prison, though this has been disputed. His organization believed in armed struggle against the Shah's regime and helped create the culture of revolutionary violence that would consume Iran in the coming years.

Khosrow Golsorkhi, a poet and communist, was executed in 1974 after a televised trial that the Shah's government intended as propaganda. It backfired spectacularly. Golsorkhi's eloquent defiance made him a martyr to the left, and his words—"I am a communist and a believer in the struggle of the people"—circulated on banned cassette tapes.

But the cemetery also holds those who died opposing the Islamic Republic. Dariush Forouhar and his wife Parvaneh were murdered in their home in 1998 during a wave of killings of dissident intellectuals. The perpetrators were eventually identified as rogue agents of the Intelligence Ministry, though questions remain about how high the orders went.

The Protests That Never End

The most recent graves tell the story of Iran's ongoing struggle over its future. Neda Agha-Soltan, a young woman shot during protests following the disputed 2009 presidential election, became an international symbol after video of her death spread across the internet. She is buried at Behesht-e Zahra.

So is Mohsen Shekari, executed in December 2022 during the "Woman, Life, Freedom" protests that followed the death of Mahsa Amini in morality police custody. He was twenty-three years old, accused of blocking a street and wounding a member of the security forces. His execution took place less than three months after his arrest.

Armita Geravand, who died in 2023 after reportedly being assaulted on the Tehran Metro for not wearing hijab properly, was sixteen years old. The government denied any assault occurred, claiming she had a medical condition. Her story—and her grave—became another focal point for those challenging the Islamic Republic's enforcement of religious dress codes.

The Weight of Names

Reading through the lists of those buried at Behesht-e Zahra is an exercise in understanding how history is not a series of abstractions but a collection of individual lives. Here is a minister of education who served the Shah; there, a minister of education who served the revolution. Here is a general who ran the secret police; there, a protester who died demanding freedom from that same security apparatus's successors.

The cemetery contains poets and politicians, physicians and pilots, senators and students. It holds people who died in their beds at ninety and people who were executed at twenty-three. It holds idealists of incompatible ideals—monarchists, communists, liberals, Islamists—all now equally silent beneath the same dry earth south of Tehran.

This is what makes Lot 41 significant. Those mass graves from the early revolutionary period—where the Shah's officials and military officers were hurriedly buried, where perhaps prisoners from the 1988 mass executions lie in unmarked ground—represent precisely the history that is most dangerous to remember and most important not to forget.

A Cemetery Is Never Just a Cemetery

In most countries, a cemetery is a place of private grief, visited by families, otherwise ignored. Behesht-e Zahra cannot be that. It is too large, too central to the nation's story, too filled with the graves of people who shaped or were shaped by Iran's revolutionary century.

Families still come to visit relatives who died in the war, now forty years past. Political activists hold commemorations at the graves of murdered dissidents. The government maintains the martyrs' sections with an attention that reflects the regime's dependence on the war's memory for its legitimacy.

And beneath a new parking lot in Lot 41, the bones of the executed bear witness to what the state would prefer to forget. The Paradise of Zahra keeps its secrets, but concrete cannot erase them entirely. The dead have a way of speaking, especially in a country where so much remains unresolved, so many wounds unhealed, and so much history contested.

Every grave is an argument about what Iran was, what it became, and what it might yet be.