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 The Main Museum kicks off with chunks of now-superseded shrine-décor interspersed with contemporary sporting medals presented by pious athletes.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 depiction of Imam Hossein’s horse returning empty to camp after the Imam’s martyrdom. 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.