The Most Beautiful Mausoleums in the World

36 places in 16 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Castel Sant'Angelo

   Italy · 1.4 km from Rome41.903° N 12.466° E

   

   Hadrian started building his own tomb in 123 CE and didn't live to see it finished — it was completed in 139 under his successor Antoninus Pius, a cylindrical drum of a monument meant to hold the ashes of an emperor and his family for eternity. Eternity lasted about three centuries as a mausoleum. By the 5th century Rome's defenders had already folded the tomb into the city's Aurelian Walls as a fortress, because a solid stone cylinder that size, sitting right on the Tiber, was too good a defensive position to leave to the dead.

   Did you know? In 537, as Goths besieged Rome, defenders hurled the tomb's bronze and stone statues down onto the attackers.

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2. 02 Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi

   Kazakhstan · 1.4 km from Turkistan43.298° N 68.271° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi in Turkistan is the building where Timurid architecture began. Timur ordered it in 1389 to replace the small twelfth-century tomb of Yasawi, a Sufi master and poet born in 1093 who spent most of his life in the town, then called Yasi, and died there in 1166. Yasawi's teaching and his verse in a Turkic language helped carry Islam across the steppe, and his grave had long been a place of pilgrimage. Timur's builders were still at work when he died in 1405, and the mausoleum has stood unfinished ever since. UNESCO made it Kazakhstan's first World Heritage Site in 2003.

   Did you know? The great bronze cauldron in the main hall weighs about two tonnes, measures 2.2 metres across and holds roughly 3,000 litres.

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3. 03 Terracotta Army

   People's Republic of China · 24.5 km from Weinan34.385° N 109.273° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The farmer who found the Terracotta Army wasn't looking for it. In March 1974, Yang Zhifa, his five brothers and a neighbor were digging a well during a drought, hoping only for water, when at about three metres down they hit a layer of charcoal and reddened soil, and past four metres one of them pulled up a life-sized pottery head. The villagers' first guess was that they'd disturbed some kind of "Pottery God" idol — it was only after bronze arrowheads and crossbow parts turned up nearby that anyone suspected they'd found something closer to an army.

   Did you know? The paint on the figures is so fragile that, once exposed to Xi'an's dry air, its lacquer base can curl within seconds and flake off in minutes.

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4. 04 Tomb of Cyrus the Great

   Iran30.194° N 53.167° E

   

   On the open plain of Pasargadae, the first capital of the Achaemenid Empire, stands a small stone house on a stepped plinth — the tomb of Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian Empire. It is almost startlingly plain: a gabled chamber of pale limestone on six receding steps, a little over 11 metres high in all, without a word of inscription surviving. That austerity is its power. It has stood for some two and a half thousand years; its blocks were laid without mortar and once tied with metal clamps, and it is often described as the oldest base-isolated structure in the world, built to ride out earthquakes.

   Did you know? The burial chamber is tiny: about 3.17 metres long and 2.11 metres wide and high, enclosed by walls up to 1.5 metres thick.

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5. 05 Taj Mahal

   India · 2.9 km from Agra27.175° N 78.042° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Shah Jahan began building this in 1631 as a tomb for his wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who had died giving birth to their fourteenth child. Its chief architect, Ustad Ahmad Lahauri, coordinated craftsmen — masons, calligraphers, inlay specialists — drawn from across the Mughal empire and beyond, housed in a purpose-built settlement called Taj Ganj that still exists today; some residents there are descendants of the original workforce, and a few still practice the same inlay and stonework trades their ancestors were brought in for.

   Did you know? Its four minarets, each over 40 metres tall, lean slightly outward so that if one ever collapsed it would fall away from the tomb.

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6. 06 Humayun's Tomb

   India · 5 km from New Delhi28.593° N 77.251° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Before the Taj Mahal there was Humayun's Tomb. Built in Delhi in the 1560s for the second Mughal emperor, it was the first great garden tomb on the Indian subcontinent and the first building there to use red sandstone on such a scale, and it set the pattern that the Mughals would refine for the next century. Seen from the western gate across its gardens, the tomb rises on a broad arcaded terrace, its white marble dome lifted high on a drum above walls of red stone picked out in white and black marble.

   Did you know? With more than 100 graves of Mughal royals and nobles in its chambers and terrace cells, the tomb is often called the Dormitory of the Mughals.

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7. 07 Gur-e Amir

   Uzbekistan · 3.2 km from Samarkand39.648° N 66.969° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Gur-e Amir, "the Tomb of the Emir", is the mausoleum of Timur, the Turco-Mongol conqueror known in the West as Tamerlane, in his capital Samarkand. Its ribbed turquoise dome, about 15 metres across, crowns an octagonal building faced with blue, pale blue and white tiles set into terracotta brick, forming geometric patterns and bands of monumental script. Few buildings of the Islamic world had such a long reach: the Timurid tomb is regarded as a forerunner of the great Mughal mausoleums built by Timur's descendants in India, from Humayun's Tomb in Delhi to the Taj Mahal.

   Did you know? According to legend, the tomb warned that whoever disturbed it would unleash an invader more terrible than Timur; people close to Gerasimov later called this story an invention.

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8. 08 Panthéon

   France · 1.4 km from Paris48.846° N 2.346° E

   

   The Panthéon began as a king's thank-offering and became a republic's hall of fame. Louis XV vowed during an illness in 1744 to rebuild the decrepit abbey church of Saint Genevieve, patron saint of Paris, on her hill in the Latin Quarter, and in 1755 the commission went to Jacques-Germain Soufflot, who had spent years studying ancient buildings in Rome. Work started in 1758 and dragged on so long that neither king nor architect lived to see it finished; Soufflot's pupil Jean-Baptiste Rondelet completed the church in 1790, just as the Revolution broke out.

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9. 09 Mausoleum of Mohammed V

   Morocco · 1.4 km from Rabat34.023° N 6.822° W

   

   On a broad esplanade above the Bou Regreg river in Rabat, two very different monuments face each other across eight centuries. On one side rises the Hassan Tower, the stump of a colossal minaret begun in 1195 under the Almohad sultan Yaqub al-Mansur for a mosque that was never finished, with ranks of truncated columns still marking out its prayer hall. On the other stands the Mausoleum of Mohammed V, the king who led Morocco to independence, a gleaming white pavilion completed in 1971. The pairing is deliberate: the modern dynasty placed its founding shrine beside the most ambitious building project of Morocco's medieval past.

   Did you know? About 400 Moroccan craftsmen worked for a decade to decorate the mausoleum, which covers roughly 1,500 square metres.

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10. 10 Samanid Mausoleum

    Uzbekistan · 2.5 km from Bukhara39.777° N 64.401° E

    

    In a quiet park on the western edge of old Bukhara stands a small cube of brick that ranks among the most important buildings of the Islamic world. The Samanid Mausoleum was raised in the early tenth century as the family tomb of the Samanid dynasty, the Persian rulers who made Bukhara one of the great cities of their age. Tradition links it to Ismail Samani, the founder of the unified Samanid state, who is said to have built it over the grave of his father; an inscription names his grandson Nasr II among those buried here, and scholars still debate under which reign it was completed. It is the oldest surviving monument of Islamic architecture in Central Asia and the only building left from the Samanid period.

    Did you know? The mausoleum of Pakistan's founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, in Karachi was modelled on this small tenth-century tomb in Bukhara.

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11. 11 Soltaniyeh Dome

    Iran · 37.3 km from Zanjan36.434° N 48.796° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The mausoleum of the Mongol ruler Öljaitü at Soltaniyeh, on a high plain in north-western Iran, carries one of the largest brick domes ever built: almost 25 metres across and about 50 metres high. It was raised between 1307 and 1313 as the centrepiece of a new imperial capital. The Ilkhanids, the Mongol dynasty that ruled Iran, preferred summer pastures to old agricultural cities, and Öljaitü's father Arghun had chosen this grassy plateau as a summer seat; Öljaitü made it the capital of the empire and built his tomb at its heart. The city declined after his death, and the mausoleum is now almost all that survives. Since 2005 it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

    Did you know? After converting to Shi'ism, Öljaitü planned to move the remains of Imam Ali and Imam Husayn from Iraq into this tomb, but the scheme was dropped.

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12. 12 Akbar's Tomb

    India · 8.2 km from Agra27.221° N 77.951° E

    

    At Sikandra, on the old road from Agra to Mathura, the Mughal emperor Akbar lies beneath a building unlike any other imperial tomb of his dynasty. Instead of a single great dome, the mausoleum rises as a four-tiered pyramid of deep red sandstone, its lower storey ringed by arcaded cloisters, and is crowned by an open pavilion of white marble that holds a cenotaph under the sky. The real grave, following custom, lies in a chamber in the basement.

    Did you know? Akbar himself chose Sikandra as the site for a garden called Bihistabad, 'Abode of Paradise', and work on his tomb may already have begun before he died.

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13. 13 Tomb of Askia

    Mali · 2.6 km from Gao16.290° N 0.044° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The Tomb of Askia in Gao is a stepped pyramid of mud brick, 17 metres high, rising from a walled courtyard in the town. It is believed to be the burial place of Askia Mohammed I, the first of the Askia emperors, who greatly expanded the Songhai Empire at the end of the 15th century. It is the largest pre-colonial monument in Gao and a key example of the Sudano-Sahelian architectural style that later spread through West Africa. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004.

    Did you know? The pyramid's mud walls bristle with protruding stakes of acacia wood called toron, which serve as permanent scaffolding for replastering.

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14. 14 Gonbad-e Qabus

    Iran · 0.7 km from Gonbad-e Kavus37.258° N 55.169° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Rising from a low mound above the plains of Golestan province in north-eastern Iran, the tower of Gonbad-e Qabus is one of the most striking single buildings of the medieval Islamic world. It was built in 1006-7 for Qabus ibn Wushmgir, ruler of the Ziyarid dynasty, as his own tomb, and it stands nearly perfect after a thousand years. The modern town around it takes its name from the monument, and in 2012 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

    Did you know? Including its foundations, the tower measures about 61 metres, roughly 11 of them hidden below ground.

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15. 15 Mausoleum of Theodoric

    Mausoleo di Teodorico

    Italy · 1 km from Ravenna44.425° N 12.209° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths, had this tomb built for himself around 520, and it looks like no other building of its time. It is a compact two-storey building of Istrian stone, ten-sided on both levels, and it is capped not by a vault but by a single enormous stone: a monolithic dome about ten metres across and weighing some 230 tonnes, hauled and lifted into place with the technology of the early 6th century.

    Did you know? A crack runs right through the monolithic roof stone and is clearly visible from the upper chamber; it probably formed when the dome was lifted and set back down.

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16. 16 Mausoleum of Galla Placidia

    Mausoleo di Galla Placidia

    Italy · 1.8 km from Ravenna44.421° N 12.197° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    From the outside there is almost nothing to prepare you. The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia is a small, low building of plain brick in the shape of a cross, its dome hidden inside a square tower, the walls relieved only by blind arcades. It was built in the second quarter of the fifth century, sometime between about 425 and 450, as an annex to the church of the Holy Cross in Ravenna, and today it sits in a garden beside the basilica of San Vitale. Step through the door, and the dim interior turns out to be completely lined with mosaic, among the oldest and best preserved in the city that is famous for them.

    Did you know? The empress was reportedly once seated embalmed in the largest sarcophagus, visible through a peephole, until children set the contents alight with a candle in 1577.

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17. 17 Gol Gumbaz

    India · 2.8 km from Vijayapura16.830° N 75.736° E

    

    The Gol Gumbaz, the "round dome" of Bijapur, now Vijayapura, in northern Karnataka, is a single colossal room. Four dark basalt walls, each about 62 metres long including the corner towers, enclose a hall roughly 41 metres across with no columns at all, and over it rises a hemispherical dome about 44 metres in external diameter, its crown some 54 metres above the floor. When it was built in the mid-17th century it was the largest dome in the Islamic world and remained the largest unsupported dome in India. Around its base runs a narrow gallery famous for its acoustics: a whisper against the wall can be heard on the far side of the dome, and a single clap returns as a string of echoes.

    Did you know? An inscription records that the sultan had soil brought from the shrine of Husayn at Karbala and placed in the central vault during construction.

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18. 18 Momine Khatun Mausoleum

    Azerbaijan · 0.7 km from Nakhchivan39.205° N 45.406° E

    

    Ten flat faces of brick, each one entirely covered in interlocking geometric patterns, rise from a stone plinth on the edge of old Nakhchivan. The Momine Khatun Mausoleum was raised in 1186, and even without its lost upper part it still stands about 25 metres tall; originally the tower reached roughly 34 metres. It is the single survivor of a larger royal complex of the Eldiguzid atabegs, the Turkic dynasty that ruled much of Azerbaijan and north-western Iran in the twelfth century.

    Did you know? Every one of the ten faces is bordered by the text of Surah Ya-Sin from the Qur'an.

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19. 19 Jaswant Thada

    India · 1.5 km from Jodhpur26.304° N 73.025° E

    

    Jaswant Thada is a memorial of white marble so thin that sunlight passes through it: the carved walls of the main cenotaph are made of finely polished sheets of Makrana marble that take on a warm glow when the sun strikes them. It stands a short distance from Mehrangarh Fort, the great fortress that towers over the city of Jodhpur.

    Did you know? Its marble came from Makrana, the same Rajasthan quarries that supplied the Taj Mahal and Kolkata's Victoria Memorial.

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20. 20 Tomb of I'timad-ud-Daulah

    India · 2.9 km from Agra27.192° N 78.031° E

    

    Before the Taj Mahal there was this: a small, square tomb on the eastern bank of the Yamuna in Agra, often called the Baby Taj or described as a jewel box. It was commissioned by Nur Jahan, the powerful wife of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, for her father Mirza Ghiyas Beg, who served at the imperial court and received the title I'timad-ud-Daulah, "pillar of the state". Built between 1622 and 1628, it holds his cenotaph and that of his wife Asmat Begum, with relatives buried in the corner chambers.

    Did you know? Mirza Ghiyas Beg, buried here, was the grandfather of Mumtaz Mahal, the empress for whom the Taj Mahal was later built.

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21. 21 Thracian Tomb of Sveshtari

    Bulgaria · 29.9 km from Razgrad43.745° N 26.766° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    In 1982 archaeologists opening a mound in the Sboryanovo necropolis of north-eastern Bulgaria found a stone tomb whose central chamber is unlike anything else known from the Thracian world. Ten female figures, carved in high relief, stand around its walls with raised arms, their lower bodies dissolving into stylised plant forms, and the lunette of the vault above them is also decorated. These half-human, half-vegetal caryatids have no parallel anywhere in the Thracian lands, which is why this small, buried building sits on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

    Did you know? The decoration was never finished: some caryatids' hands are only roughly hewn and the lunette painting is partly just outlined in black, suggesting the ruler died suddenly.

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22. 22 Sultan Sanjar's mausoleum

    Turkmenistan · 30 km from Mary37.664° N 62.164° E

    

    In the flat desert of southeastern Turkmenistan, amid the eroded walls of ancient Merv, one great brick building still stands almost whole. The mausoleum of Sultan Ahmad Sanjar is a massive cube, roughly 17 metres on each side, carrying a gallery of open arches and a broad dome that once wore a skin of turquoise tiles visible from far across the plain. It rises at the centre of Sultan Kala, the walled city of the Seljuk period, and is now part of the State Historical and Cultural Park "Ancient Merv", inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1999.

    Did you know? The building's architect is recorded by name as Muhammad ibn Aziz.

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23. 23 Al-Mansour Qalawun Complex (Madrassa, Tomb and Hospital)

    Egypt · 1.3 km from Cairo30.049° N 31.261° E

    

    On al-Muizz Street, the old ceremonial spine of medieval Cairo, a stone façade 67 metres long rises above the street, its pointed-arched panels framing tall windows and its minaret climbing in three stages near the entrance. Behind it is the complex that Sultan al-Mansur Qalawun built in 1284–1285: a madrasa, a mosque, his own mausoleum and a hospital, all raised in about thirteen months. It is counted among the major monuments of Mamluk architecture, and the façade shows clear similarities with Gothic and Crusader building.

    Did you know? The hospital was built first and in under six months, while the mausoleum and the madrasa are each said to have taken only about four months.

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24. 24 Cappella Colleoni

    Italy · 0.7 km from Bergamo45.703° N 9.662° E

    

    Squeezed against the flank of the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo's upper town, the Colleoni Chapel announces itself with a façade unlike anything around it: a dense, almost jewelled surface of white, red and black marble lozenges, carved reliefs, statues, medallions and a large rose window, rising to an octagonal drum and a lantern-topped dome. It is the mausoleum of Bartolomeo Colleoni, the fifteenth-century condottiero who rose to be captain general of the armies of the Republic of Venice, and the masterpiece of the architect and sculptor Giovanni Antonio Amadeo.

    Did you know? Colleoni's coat of arms shows three testicles, a pun on his surname, and his troops' battle cry was reportedly Coglia, Coglia, Coglia.

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25. 25 Tomb of Shah Rukn-e-Alam

    Pakistan · 1.8 km from Multan30.199° N 71.471° E

    

    Rising from the old fort mound of Multan, the tomb of Shah Rukn-e-Alam is a huge octagon of polished red brick crowned by a white dome, visible from far across the city. Built between 1320 and 1324, it is regarded as the earliest example of Tughluq architecture, older than the Tughluq monuments of Delhi, and as one of the most impressive mausoleums of the Indian subcontinent. It is also a living shrine: the annual urs commemorating the saint draws more than 100,000 pilgrims.

    Did you know? The saint's title, Rukn-e-Alam, means 'Pillar of the World'; he was born in Multan in 1251 and died there in 1335.

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26. 26 Aisha Bibi

    Kazakhstan · 14.6 km from Taraz42.834° N 71.210° E

    

    Few buildings in Central Asia are as delicate as the small mausoleum of Aisha Bibi. Its walls are faced with carved terracotta tiles, forming a lace of floral and geometric ornament and stylised calligraphy in some sixty different patterns. Built in the eleventh or twelfth century, it stands in the village that bears its name in southern Kazakhstan, on the old Silk Road route that passed through the city of Taraz, and it is one of the finest surviving monuments of the Karakhanid era.

    Did you know? According to one legend, 16-year-old Aisha was bitten by a snake that had crept into her clothes while she bathed in the Assa River, an hour from her beloved.

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27. 27 Qutb Shahi tombs

    India · 8.7 km from Hyderabad17.395° N 78.396° E

    

    Domed mausoleums of dark basalt rise from raised terraces in a walled garden at the foot of Golconda Fort. The Qutb Shahi tombs hold seven of the eight sultans of the Qutb Shahi dynasty, which ruled Golconda and founded Hyderabad, together with queens, princes, physicians, courtesans and commanders of their court. Each royal tomb follows the same scheme: a square or octagonal chamber surrounded by pointed arcades, one or two storeys high, crowned by a dome, with the sarcophagus in the chamber standing above the real grave in a crypt below. The forms blend Persian and Indian traditions, and the domes were once faced with blue and green glazed tiles, of which only traces survive.

    Did you know? The 106-acre complex holds about 80 structures, including some 40 mausoleums, 23 mosques, a mortuary bath and seven stepwells and water structures.

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28. 28 Medici Chapels

    Cappelle medicee

    Italy · 0.6 km from Florence43.775° N 11.253° E

    

    Two very different rooms behind the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence make up the Medici Chapels, and between them they show the family that ruled Florence and then Tuscany at two extremes of taste. One is Michelangelo's New Sacristy, a cool, grey-and-white space of stone and sculpture; the other is the Chapel of the Princes, an immense octagon sheathed from floor to dome in coloured marbles and inlaid semi-precious stones.

    Did you know? During the siege of Florence in 1529–1530 Michelangelo hid in a small vaulted room beneath the New Sacristy after backing the republic.

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29. 29 Tomb of Khai Dinh

    Vietnam · 7.9 km from Huế16.399° N 107.588° E

    

    The tomb of Khải Định is the last and strangest of the imperial mausoleums around Huế, the former capital of the Nguyễn dynasty. Khải Định reigned from 1916 to 1925 under French colonial rule, and the tomb he ordered, officially Ứng Lăng, breaks with the landscaped pavilions of his predecessors. Instead of wooden halls in a park, it is a compact, vertical composition of concrete, steel and slate climbing the slope of Châu Chữ mountain, begun in September 1920 and finished in 1931, six years after the emperor's death. He is said to have raised taxes sharply to pay for it, though historians note that the colonial administration held the real purse strings.

    Did you know? Building the tomb took eleven years, and the work was funded in part by a 30 percent rise in the tax on farmland across the country.

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30. 30 Njegoš Mausoleum

    Његошев маузолеј

    Montenegro · 36 km from Podgorica42.400° N 18.838° E

    

    The mausoleum of Petar II Petrović-Njegoš occupies the whole crest of Jezerski vrh, one of the summits of Mount Lovćen, at about 1,660 metres above the sea. Njegoš, prince-bishop of Montenegro, philosopher and its most celebrated poet, chose this peak as his resting place himself: in 1845 he built a small chapel here, and although he died in 1851 and was first buried at Cetinje Monastery, his remains were carried up the mountain in 1855. The building visitors see today is the second monument on the site, and its story reflects a century of Balkan history.

    Did you know? Ivan Meštrović drew his first sketches for a Njegoš mausoleum in 1924, and they were exhibited that same year at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

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