Tabriz has been flattened by earthquakes and rebuilt as an Ilkhanid capital, a Safavid frontier city and the cradle of Iran's Constitutional Revolution. Three days of brick mausoleums, Qajar courtyard houses, Armenian churches and Iron Age burials.
Iran's second archaeological museum, opened 1958: 6,000-year-old Hasanlu bronzes, Achaemenid seals, Parthian glass, and a basement of Ahad Hosseini's bronze anti-war sculptures. Open 09:00–18:00, closed Mondays.
Built over a 3,800-year-old cemetery uncovered by roadworks in 1997. Skeletons lie in situ in foetal position beside their jars, beads and bronze pins, viewed from a glass walkway in a dim sunken hall.
The congregational mosque against the bazaar's Mozaffariyeh wing, Seljuk in its core with Ilkhanid and Safavid rebuilds after repeated quakes. Massive brick piers carry a low winter shabestan of squat arches.
The 1318–1339 mausoleum-mosque of Ilkhanid vizier Taj al-Din Ali Shah, whose vault collapsed during construction. What survives is a 26 m stump of the thickest brick wall ever raised, later a Qajar cannon foundry.
The 1880s garden house of Amir Nezam Garrousi in Sheshgelan: three storeys of sash and stained-glass windows around a courtyard, with nine halls of Qajar arms, coins, lighting, medicine and court portraiture.
Tabriz's 1934 city hall, German-designed in grey stone with a clock tower whose bells still chime the hour. Seen from above the plan forms a stylised eagle; the ground floor holds the municipal history museum.
The modest courtyard home of Sattar Khan, the horse dealer turned commander who held Tabriz through the royalist siege of 1908–09 and kept the Constitutional Revolution alive. Amirkhiz was his quarter and power base.
A 1970s concrete arch-lattice in Surkhab over the graves of some 400 writers buried on this ground since the 11th century, among them Khaqani, Qatran Tabrizi and the Azeri-language poet Shahriar, who died in 1988.
A Qajar merchant's mansion in the old Sheshgelan quarter, now an anthropology museum. Wax tableaux of Tabrizi weddings, bathhouses and bazaar trades fill rooms lined with orsi windows and mirrored plasterwork.
Shah Tahmasp raised this Safavid mosque in 1636 over a ruined Timurid palace mosque, rebuilding again after the 1780 earthquake. The square outside served as Tabriz's execution ground and later a Constitutionalist rallying point.
Tabriz's Armenian cathedral, in use since at least the 12th century and described by Marco Polo when he passed through the city. Black-and-ochre stone, a domed nave, and an adjoining Armenian school and graveyard.
An 18th-century Zand-era house remodelled under the Qajars, now the campus of Tabriz Islamic Art University alongside the Ganjeizadeh house. Separate summer and winter wings, frescoed niches and orsi glass face a pool courtyard.