Soltaniyeh Dome
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- 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.
- Eight minarets once rose from the upper terrace, one at each corner of the octagon.
- In 1318 Pope John XXII made Soltaniyeh the seat of a Catholic archdiocese, serving Dominican and Franciscan missions in the Mongol empire.
- The interior was decorated twice: first in bare brick with Kufic inscriptions in turquoise tiles, then covered entirely in plaster and painted.
- Its windows were fitted with bronze screens whose knobs and balls were set with gold and silver.
- The Castilian envoy Ruy González de Clavijo passed through and described Soltaniyeh as a hub of the silk trade.
- An Ottoman miniature by Matrakçı Nasuh around 1550 shows the complex flanked by minarets and crowned by five domes.
- The name Soltaniyeh comes from the title sultan and can be rendered roughly as 'the Imperial'.
- Inside, two tiers of eight-bay arcades ring the chamber, with a third gallery running just below the base of the dome.
- The mausoleum was entered on Iran's national heritage list in January 1932, more than seventy years before its UNESCO listing.
Why it is worth it
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.
The octagonal building was designed to rival the great tomb of the Seljuq sultan Sanjar at Merv. Its dome is double-shelled, one of the earliest of its kind in Iran, and was built of brick laid in an interlocking herringbone network, a technique that has prompted scholars to compare it with Brunelleschi's dome in Florence a century later; whether there was any direct influence remains debated. The complex included a mosque, residences and a garden watered by qanats.
Much of the exterior tilework has gone, but the interior still shows exceptional decoration, from tile and carved plaster to painted ornament and bands of white inscriptions on a blue ground. The tomb's scale and ideas travelled widely: paired minarets over a portal, multiple domes and the planned funerary complex all reappear in later buildings across the Persianate and Ottoman worlds, and the monument is often cited among the ancestors of the Taj Mahal.
Restoration has gone on since the 1970s, and a great deal of scaffolding still fills the interior, which visitors often find fascinating in its own right.
Getting there
Soltaniyeh is about 40 km from Zanjan, the provincial capital, and about 240 km north-west of Tehran; most visitors come by car or bus from Zanjan. Zanjan Airport (JWN) has a small number of domestic flights; Sardar-e-Jangal Airport at Rasht (RAS), about 123 km away in a straight line, lies across the Alborz mountains and is not a practical approach.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Dome of Soltaniyeh – variously called the Mausoleum of Oljaytu, Tomb of Uljaytu, or Soltaniya complex, among other designations – is a historic mausoleum and monument complex, located in Soltaniyeh, Zanjan, Iran. It was built as the mausoleum of the Ilkhanid Mongol ruler Öljaitü. It was originally the centerpiece of a larger complex of buildings that included a mosque, residences, and other services, though these other buildings have generally not been preserved.
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