Museum sights in Mashhad
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Carpet Museum
That's an image you'll find repeated as both carpet and giant wood-inlay works in the separate Carpet Museum, where rugs range from beautiful classics through to garish coral gardens and a Tabriz-made carpet-portrait of WWI bogey-man Kaiser Wilhelm II. Tying the staggering 30 million knots for Seven Beloved Cities took 14 years. Upstairs, beside the shoe-deposit counter, is a two-room Calligraphy Gallery displaying priceless Korans, many dating back over a millennium.
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B
Main Museum
Bequests and donations from the faithful fill the Haram’s fascinatingly eclectic museums. The Main Museum kicks off with chunks of now-superseded shrine-décor interspersed with contemporary sporting medals presented by pious athletes. The basement stamp collection includes a 1983 commemorative featuring the ‘Takeover of the US Spy Den’. The 1st-floor Visual Arts Gallery offers you the opportunity to shower money (or hats) down onto the top of the Holy Shrine’s fourth zarih tomb encasement (replaced in 2001). Amid seashells and naturalist landscape-paintings of Surrey, notice Mahmood Farshchian’s modern classic Afternoon of Ashura. It’s a grief-stricken depictio…
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C
Mehdi Gholibek Hamam
In its shadow, Mehdi Gholibek Hamam is one of Iran’s most interesting and spacious bathhouse museums. The main delight is the wonderful central dome re-painted for centuries in multiple levels – most recently in 1922 with naive murals that feature anthropomorphic figures gallivanting between giant bicycles, a Russian vintage car, an early biplane and a curiously unconcerned- looking victim facing a firing squad.
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Foreign Pilgrims Assistance Office
Friendly, multilingual staff at the Foreign Pilgrims Assistance Office can show you a 20-minute video about the Haram and shower you with books on all things Shiite. However, once you've visited this office there's no escape from the free, friendly but over-protective guide/minder they assign you.
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