Mashhad

Mashhad began as the village of Sanabad, beside the much older city of Tus, where the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid was buried in 808. Ten years later Ali al-Rida, the eighth imam of Twelver Shia Islam and known in Iran as Imam Reza, died there and was buried in the same place. The site took the name Mashhad, "the place of martyrdom", and a shrine grew over the grave. Pilgrims came, and a town gathered around them.

The shrine was sacked more than once — by the Ghaznavids and later during the Mongol invasions, which also destroyed Tus — and each time it was rebuilt larger. Under the Timurids the complex gained the Goharshad Mosque, completed in the 1420s for Goharshad, the wife of Shah Rukh, and finished around 1430. When the Safavids made Twelver Shia Islam the religion of the state in the 16th century, Mashhad became the country's supreme place of pilgrimage, and the shrine acquired the gilded dome and minarets that still define it. Shah Abbas I walked there from Isfahan.

In the 18th century Nader Shah, a Khorasani who seized the throne after the Safavids fell, made Mashhad his capital, and he is buried in the city. The following two centuries brought a long, steady growth on pilgrim traffic, and after the revolution of 1979 the shrine's foundation, Astan Quds Razavi, became one of the largest institutions in the country, with landholdings, factories and a construction programme that cleared and rebuilt much of the old centre around the complex. The city expanded west across the plain and is now second in size only to Tehran.

Mashhad's culture is inseparable from the shrine. The religious calendar sets the rhythm of the year, the flow of visitors and the trade of the streets; black drapes appear across whole boulevards during Muharram, and the anniversaries of the imam fill the courtyards to capacity. Free food is cooked and distributed on a very large scale, an old tradition of the shrine kitchens, and hospitality towards pilgrims is a point of civic pride. The city receives far more Iranian than foreign visitors, and many arrive as extended families making the journey together.

It is also the capital of Khorasan, a region with its own long literary and musical identity. Ferdowsi, whose Shahnameh preserved Persian epic and much of the language itself, was from Tus a few kilometres away, and Omar Khayyam and the poet Attar are buried at Nishapur; all three are national figures, and their tombs are visited almost as reverently as the shrine. Khorasan's bakhshi bards, who sing epic and love poetry to the two-stringed dotar, are recognised by UNESCO as intangible heritage, and the province's Kurdish and Turkmen communities keep their own music and dress.

Manners in the city are formal and conservative. Dress codes are enforced more firmly than in Tehran, quiet behaviour is expected near the shrine, and the elaborate courtesies of Persian taarof — repeated offers, polite refusals — are part of every transaction.

More than three million people live in Mashhad, making it Iran's second largest city, and many millions more pass through each year as pilgrims. That traffic is the economy: hotels and guesthouses at every price, transport, catering, prayer goods, souvenirs, saffron and nut shops, and the vast property and commercial interests of the shrine foundation. Around it sit food processing, textiles, car assembly and the trade of a regional capital serving the whole of Khorasan.

The city has grown outwards in rings. The old quarters around the shrine were largely demolished and rebuilt in the decades after 1979, replaced by hotels and pedestrian approaches, while the middle classes moved west along Ahmadabad, Sajjad and Vakilabad into apartment blocks and gated compounds. Poorer neighbourhoods lie to the south and east, and the city has absorbed large numbers of Afghan refugees and migrants, many working in construction and small workshops.

Days begin early and pause in the afternoon heat of summer. Families walk in the parks in the evening, weekends mean picnics in the Torqabeh and Shandiz valleys, and the metro and shared taxis carry the working population across long distances. Water is a constant concern in a dry province, as is air quality in winter. Like the rest of the country, the city has lived through years of sanctions, high inflation and, since February 2026, war.

Mashhad's own dish is sholeh mashhadi, a thick, long-cooked porridge of meat, pulses, rice and herbs, dark and heavily spiced, sold from large pots and often prepared in quantity for religious occasions. The other local standby is dizi, or abgusht, a stew of lamb, chickpeas and potato served in a stone pot, its broth poured over torn bread and the solids then pounded to a paste at the table.

The great eating tradition of the region, though, is kebab in the valleys west of the city. Shandiz and Torqabeh are known across Iran for shishlik, large pieces of lamb grilled over charcoal, eaten in garden restaurants beside running water with saffron rice, grilled tomatoes, herbs and flatbread. Doogh, salted yoghurt thinned with water and flavoured with mint, is the usual drink alongside.

Khorasan is Iran's saffron province, and the shops around the shrine sell it by weight beside barberries, pistachios, walnuts and dried fruit. A large part of the trade is sweets — gaz and sohan among them — and the shops also sell nabat, crystallised sugar on a stick, often coloured with saffron and stirred into tea. Sweetened saffron rice puddings, rosewater pastries and endless small glasses of black tea complete the picture; alcohol is illegal, and teahouses and juice bars take its social place.