Tekyeh Moaven ol-Molk

A tekyeh is a building for the mourning ceremonies of Muharram, when Shia Muslims remember the martyrdom of Imam Hussain at Karbala, and where the passion plays called ta’zieh were staged. The Tekyeh Moaven ol-Molk in old Kermanshah is the most famous of these buildings in western Iran, not for its size but for its extraordinary tiles.

It was built at the start of the twentieth century by a family of local notables, beginning with Hossein Khan Moein ol-Ra’aya and completed by his son Hassan Khan Moaven ol-Molk, and it came into use around 1903. The complex is a sequence of courtyards and halls: the Hosseinieh, the Zeynabieh and the Abbasieh, each dedicated to a figure of the Karbala story.

Its walls are covered with painted tiles in the late Qajar style, made over several decades. Alongside scenes of Karbala and portraits of religious figures, there are kings and heroes of the Shahnameh, Persian legends, views of Kermanshah and its people, and even European figures and buildings. The mix of the sacred and the secular, the Shia and the pre-Islamic, is typical of the visual culture of the period and makes the tekyeh a kind of illustrated encyclopaedia of how Iranians of the time saw their own history.

The building was registered as a national monument in 1975. It is still used during Muharram, and the rest of the year it welcomes visitors who come to read its walls tile by tile.