Tus

Tus is the one place in this atlas that belongs not to the story but to its teller. Abolqasem Ferdowsi was born around 940 at the village of Bazh in the district of Tus, into a family of dehqans, landed gentry who kept the old Iranian stories. Tus was already a home of the epic: in 957 its governor, Abu Mansur Mohammad ibn Abd al-Razzaq, commissioned a prose Book of Kings from keepers of the old traditions gathered from across Khorasan, and Ferdowsi's poem is based largely on that work. Some later writers also said the city was named after Tus, son of Nowzar, a commander of the heroic age, but that is tradition rather than history.

Ferdowsi worked on the poem for some thirty years and completed it around 1010, dedicating it to Mahmud of Ghazni. A famous story told by Nezami Aruzi of Samarqand, in his Four Discourses in the twelfth century, says the sultan rewarded him meanly, that the poet gave the money away, and that Mahmud later relented and sent a fortune. The camels carrying it entered Tus by one gate as Ferdowsi's body was carried out by another. Nezami Aruzi adds that a local preacher refused him burial in the Muslim cemetery, so he was buried in his own garden. Historians treat the story with caution, but it has shaped how Iranians remember him.

Tus today

Medieval Tus was largely ruined by the Mongols, and nearby Mashhad grew to replace it. The tomb of Ferdowsi, a stone mausoleum built in 1934 for the millennium of his birth, stands in a garden among the ruins, with scenes from the epic carved in its halls. Readers, schoolchildren and naqqal storytellers come here to recite the poem, and on the day Iran now marks in Ferdowsi's honour, in May, crowds gather at the tomb. The ruined citadel walls and the domed Haruniyeh building are nearby.