The Bloody Throne of Naser al-Din Shah Finally Revealed!

According to Saed News, quoting Hamshahri, on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of his reign, Naser al-Din Shah Qajar visited the shrine of Hazrat Abdul Azim. While performing the circumambulation of the shrine, Mirza Reza Kermani approached him, raised his Russian five-barrel pistol, and shot the Shah. Following this event, Naser al-Din Shah became known as the “Martyr King,” and the rural populace dubbed his assassin “Reza Shah Shikar.”

Samira Babajanpour writes that Mirza Reza had come from Kerman to deliver complaints about the governor of Kerman to the Shah. Yet, over several years, circumstances turned until he used the same Russian five-barrel pistol, initially purchased to assassinate Kamran Mirza, to kill Naser al-Din Shah, earning the infamous title “Reza Shah Shikar.”

After the shooting, the Shah was seated on a chair, and a cloth was placed over his wound—but he died on the spot. However, his story did not end there. It took a year to bury him at the site of his assassination because the posthumous ceremonies for the fourth Qajar king were as elaborate as those during his life.

Due to the lengthy preparations, the body was moved to Tekyeh Dowlat from the very first days after the assassination—precisely the place where he had annually sat near the harem women during Muharram to watch the Ta’zieh performances. The Shah’s body remained in a glass container for a year before finally being interred in the grounds between the shrine of Hazrat Abdul Azim Hassani and Imamzadeh Hamzeh.

A key detail about Naser al-Din Shah’s assassination is that no one was prepared for his death. He had seemingly convinced everyone that he would rule Iran forever. Consequently, no memorial was established for him, and no proper tomb was prepared. Interestingly, it took four years to craft his gravestone. The stone, made by the renowned Yazdi master Hossein Hajar Bashi, carried a grim fate of its own: during its transport from Yazd to Tehran, approximately 50 people died, and Hajar Bashi himself, having spent four years creating it, died of grief despite receiving a mere 100 toman from Mozaffar al-Din Shah for his efforts.

Today, all that remains of Naser al-Din Shah’s grandeur and pomp are a photograph of his body at Tekyeh Dowlat, the blood-stained cloth upon which he died, and the gravestone—kept not at his burial site but in a museum.

Remarkably, in 2005, the Cultural Heritage Organization, in collaboration with the Pasteur Institute, extracted the Shah’s DNA from the blood-stained cloth to study his physical traits—though no official report has been published to date.