Rey

Rey, called Ragha in the Avesta and Rhagae by the Greeks, is one of the most frequently named cities in the Shahnameh. Armies muster there, kings pass through it, and in the historical age it is the home of Bahram Chubin. In the poem Bahram is a nobleman of Rey, of an old family, and when he rebels against Khosrow Parviz he is the first man outside the Sasanian house to sit on the throne of Iran for generations.

Bahram's rebellion is one of the most dramatic sequences of the epic. Khosrow Parviz, driven out, takes refuge with the Roman emperor and returns with a Roman army. Bahram is defeated and flees east to the court of the Turkish khaqan, where he is assassinated by a hired killer. Ferdowsi gives him a dignified end and a faithful sister, Gordiyeh, who leads his followers home and becomes a warrior in her own right. The poem treats him as a great soldier undone by ambition rather than as a villain.

The city today

Rey was one of the great cities of medieval Iran, a centre of learning where the physician al-Razi was born, until the Mongols devastated it in the 1220s. Today it is a district in the south of Tehran. Its monuments include the Seljuk-era Toghrul Tower, the hillside spring of Cheshmeh Ali and the shrine of Shah Abdol-Azim. On a nearby hill stands the shrine of Bibi Shahrbanu, which popular tradition links with a daughter of Yazdegerd III, the last Sasanian king, said to have married the Imam Hossein. Historians treat that story as legend, but it shows how the end of the Shahnameh's world is still remembered in the city.