Tomb of Avicenna

Abu Ali Sina, known in Europe as Avicenna, was the most influential physician and philosopher of the medieval Islamic world. Born near Bukhara around 980, he wrote, among many works, the Canon of Medicine, which was studied in Europe as a medical textbook for centuries. He spent his last years in the service of rulers in western Iran and died in Hamadan in 1037, where he was buried.

The present mausoleum was completed in 1952 for the millennium of his birth by the Islamic calendar, to a design by the architect Houshang Seyhoun. Its most striking feature is a tall open tower of twelve concrete piers rising to a point, which recalls the medieval tower tomb of Gonbad-e Qabus. The building is a fine example of the Pahlavi-era effort to give Iran's great figures modern monuments in an idiom drawn from history.

Beneath the tower lies the tomb chamber, with a plain stone over the grave. The complex also contains a library and a small museum of manuscripts and objects connected with medieval medicine and science. The mausoleum stands in a garden square in the city centre, and its name has passed to the square itself, so that in Hamadan directions are often given from Bu Ali, as the philosopher is familiarly called.