Sultan Sanjar's mausoleum
Interesting facts
- The building's architect is recorded by name as Muhammad ibn Aziz.
- Its lost double dome had an inner shell of blue glazed brick beneath an outer one clad in turquoise tiles.
- The mausoleum was Sanjar's second great project, after a massive dam he had built on the Murghab River.
- Sanjar came to power as a boy of about 10 or 12, appointed by his half-brother Berk-Yaruq after wars of succession.
- The Ilkhanid ruler Ghazan Khan was so struck by the tomb on a visit to Merv that he set out to surpass it with his own funerary complex.
- A survey of 1879–81 found the mausoleum standing in the centre of a four-part chahar bagh garden, surrounded by small tombs and graves.
- Excavations in 1996 uncovered a bazaar and a caravanserai right beside the tomb.
- The mausoleum was pictured on Turkmenistan's 100-manat banknote of the 1990s.
Why it is worth it
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.
Ahmad Sanjar (1085–1157) ruled the eastern lands of the Seljuk Turks from Merv for some four decades and is remembered as the last great sultan of the dynasty. Medieval writers describe his reign as prosperous, but in 1141 he was defeated by the Qara Khitai, and in 1153 he was captured by Oghuz tribesmen, who plundered his province; he escaped in 1156 and died the following year. Tradition holds that he ordered the tomb himself and called it the "House of the Hereafter". It formed the centre of a larger complex with a mosque and palace, and later builders of the Ilkhanid, Timurid and Safavid eras took up its double dome and its squat, interior-focused proportions; it is often cited as the earliest known combination of mosque and mausoleum.
Merv never fully recovered from the Oghuz raid, and in 1221 a Mongol army under Tolui took the city after a seven-day siege. The chronicler Ibn al-Athir wrote that the invaders burned Sanjar's mausoleum after digging up his grave in search of treasure; the outer dome collapsed and much of the outer brickwork was lost. The building stood neglected for centuries, photographed in ruins in 1896 and 1926. Soviet architects studied and repaired it from 1937 onward, uncovering the foundations of the adjoining mosque, and a further restoration supported by Turkey was carried out in 2002–2004. Some later work, especially in the 1980s, has been criticised for covering original brickwork with conjectural reconstruction, yet the building remains one of the few surviving major Seljuk funerary monuments.
Getting there
The mausoleum stands in the ancient city of Merv, about 5 km from the modern town of Bayramaly in Mary Province. The nearest airport is Mary International Airport (MYP), about 24 km away, serving the regional centre of Mary.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Tomb of Ahmad Sanjar is a mausoleum commemorating Ahmad Sanjar, a Seljuk ruler of Khorasan. It was built in 1157 in the medieval city of Merv in the Karakum Desert in Turkmenistan. Throughout his reign, Sanjar fought off several invasions and uprisings until finally being defeated by the Oghuz. After being sacked by the Oghuz, Merv declined and in 1221, the Mongols attacked it and burned down the mausoleum. It would later be restored by Soviet, Turkmen, and Turkish architects during the 20th and 21st centuries. The tomb is part of The State Historical and Cultural Park "Ancient Merv", a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
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