Grabmal des Omar Chayyam

Omar Khayyam, mathematician, astronomer and poet, was born and died in Nishapur; Britannica dates his life 1048-1131, though his death year is disputed^5,6. Nezami Aruzi, who had met Khayyam at Balkh, relates that Khayyam predicted there that his grave would lie where flowers would shed their petals on it each spring; visiting Nishapur in 1135 or 1136, Nezami found it in the Hira cemetery at the foot of a garden wall, hidden under blossoms^1,6. The tradition placing the grave beside the shrine of Imamzadeh Mohammad Mahruq is first recorded by the Scottish traveller James Baillie Fraser in 1821¹. Later visitors, among them the scholar A. V. Williams Jackson, described a plain brick grave without an inscription¹.

Talk of a new tomb began in 1926, and in 1933-1934 Karim Taherzadeh Behzad raised a simple memorial over the old grave in time for Ferdowsi’s millennium: a stone column 4.2 m high, inscribed with verses by Malek-osh-Shoara Bahar, on a platform 5 m square¹. It was criticised from the start, and a new design requested from André Godard and Maxime Siroux in 1937 was halted by the Second World War¹. The Society for National Heritage revived the project in 1956 and gave it to Houshang Seyhoun^1,3. After nearly four years of work the new tomb was inaugurated on 1 April 1963 in the presence of Mohammad Reza Shah¹.

Seyhoun wrote that he set out to express three sides of Khayyam: the mathematician, the astronomer and the poet^1,7. The tomb rests on ten piers, the number taken as a mathematical symbol; as they curve inward and continue up into the dome, their ribs form a lattice of lozenges that ends in a ten-pointed star, open at the centre to the sky in honour of the astronomer^1,7. The poet is present in the tile panels set between the ribs, which carry his quatrains in calligraphy over abstract patterns^1,2,7. The structure is a regular decagon about 5 m in radius and about 22 m high, built on a metal frame¹.

Officials had complained that the 1934 memorial lacked presence beside the shrine, so Seyhoun moved the tomb to the northeast of the garden, into an orchard about 3 m lower than the shrine, and kept it below the level of the shrine’s platform and dome¹. Citing Nezami Aruzi’s story, he wanted a grave open on every side, where spring blossoms would fall¹. A new east-west avenue leads to it, and the garden was split between the tomb (about 20,000 m²) and the shrine (about 23,000 m²)¹. Mozaffari and Westbrook consider the ribbed structure one of the inspirations for the Shahyad (now Azadi) monument in Tehran, on which Seyhoun was a collaborating architect².

The tomb is an open canopy, since Seyhoun meant the grave to be open on every side¹. Standing beneath it, the visitor looks up at the ribs converging into the ten-pointed star, with the sky visible through its central opening^1,2. Between the ribs, panels of coloured tile mosaic carry Khayyam’s quatrains in calligraphy^1,2,7. At the centre lies the gravestone, which Seyhoun designed as a pentagonal, diamond-like block inspired by Khayyam’s geometry¹. It records his death in the year 517 of the Hijra (1123-24), the date most researchers prefer according to Ebrahimzadeh Namvar and Jayhani, while Britannica gives 1131^1,5.