The Megillat Esther that we read on Purim opens with the words “It came to pass in the days of Ahasuerus,” but it does not tell us what became of its heroes after the king’s death. According to the tradition of the Jews of Persia, after Haman’s downfall, hostility toward the Jews intensified, and Mordechai and Esther left Shushan and wandered north, to the city of Hamadan. There they died at a ripe old age, and there they were buried.
Above their graves a mausoleum was built, which still stands today. For generations, Iranian Jews would come here especially on Purim, in order to read the Megillah as close as possible to the story’s heroes. Until not long ago, Jewish tourists from abroad also visited the site, but today holders of Israeli passports cannot reach it. At least not yet.
And yet, over the past decade, this tomb has returned to my life through photographs and stories. All of them were brought to me by a friend, who prays with me in the same synagogue, and whose job in public service brings him again and again to Iran, including in the past year. For security reasons I cannot mention his name, and I call him here “Charvonah,” after the spy courtier in the Megillah who gathered confidential information and revealed it to the king, thereby changing the course of the story.
In the first photograph he showed me years ago, a narrow brick tower rises above the city Shush (Shushan), a low, pale building. The light is thin and wintry, the kind that refuses to warm stone. At the foot of the wall stands a small metal gate. No flags. No crowd. Just a place that seems to be waiting.
This is how the tomb of Mordechai and Esther returned to my life, not as a childhood verse and not as a Purim costume, but as a sequence of light, dust, and walls.
Iran's Tomb of Mordechai and Esther today
The mausoleum stands in the city of Hamedan, 30 kilometers north of Shush. According to tradition, this is the resting place of Queen Esther and Mordechai.
The earliest written testimony identifying the site is attributed to Benjamin of Tudela, the 12th century Jewish traveler, who wrote: “Media city, and there are about fifty thousand of Israel, and there, before one synagogue, Mordechai and Esther are buried.”
THE ENTRANCE to the compound lies in the heart of the city, beside a public garden with benches and plants. The entrance door itself is made of thick stone and is about only a meter high. To enter, one must bend down, almost bow. At the center of the door, a small hole is carved, through which the caretaker releases a hidden internal bolt, and only then pushes the heavy stone inward.
Other photographs by Charvonah lead inside. At the entrance, one removes shoes. The first room once served for lighting candles and reciting Psalms. On the walls are black stone plaques with verses and dedications, alongside posters in Arabic and Hebrew.
From this room, three steps descend to an even lower doorway, only about 80 centimeters high, leading to the burial chamber. The tombs are built of concrete to roughly human height, their lower sections clad in reddish, polished mahogany panels, carved with wooden panels having geometric ornamentation. At their tops are verses from the Book of Esther in large Hebrew letters. On Mordechai’s tomb is engraved: “There was a Jewish man in Shushan the capital, whose name was Mordechai, son of Yair, son of Shim’iy, son of Kish, a Benjaminite.” On Esther’s tomb: “Esther daughter of Avihail, to confirm this second letter of Purim.”
Above the grave of Queen Esther once hung a vessel which, according to legend, contained the golden crown that King Ahasuerus placed on Esther’s head when he made her queen in place of Vashti. About a hundred years ago, the crown was stolen, and later discovered in the Louvre Museum in Paris. Jewish communities in Iran and in France raised an outcry for the return of the stolen property. The museum quickly removed it from display, and to this day denies that it is in their possession. The Jews of Hamedan suspected the tomb’s caretaker of stealing and selling the crown. They said that the curse of the rabbi of Hamedan lay upon his family, for each of his children died prematurely before the age of twenty, as punishment for the theft.
Above each grave is built a kind of canopy, over which colorful scarves are draped. An old custom held that those seeking health and children would place a scarf on Mordechai’s grave, and those seeking livelihood, one on Esther’s grave. Every morning, the caretaker would remove most of them, leaving only two.
On the walls of the chamber appear stone reliefs and Hebrew verses, including “There was a Jewish man in Shushan the capital,” alongside the inscription: “The Lord reigns, the Lord has reigned, the Lord shall reign forever and ever.”
CHARVONAH’S PHOTOGRAPHS show no faces, for obvious reasons. If the authorities were to identify the people, they would be interrogated under torture in order to trace him. His photographs therefore linger on hands resting on velvet cloth, on reflections in a glass lamp, on the texture of wood smoothed by generations of visitors. In one image, a thin layer of dust drifts in the corner of the hall. Even through the screen, a faint smell of old bricks and candle smoke seems to rise.
Every few years, the tomb returns to the headlines, but not because of prayer. In 2011, student demonstrations demanded that the site be stripped of its official status. On the protest signs appeared the number 77,000, taken from the Book of Esther: “And the rest of the Jews who were in the king’s provinces assembled and stood for their lives, and had rest from their enemies, and slew of them that hated them seventy and five thousand.” Following the protests, the status was briefly revoked, but after demonstrations by residents of Hamedan, it was restored.
On the Palestinian Nakba Day, May 14, 2020, the tomb complex was set on fire. On the following Sabbath, Charvonah showed us photographs of blackened walls, charred wooden panels and burned carpets. He said the flames licked the lower parts of the wooden panels that encase the tomb structures, and that all the carpets and some of the furniture were burned as well. In recent years, additional arson attempts have also been reported. Since October 7, 2023, Palestinian and Hezbollah flags have been hung on the entrance sign.
Between fire and recognition, the building continues to stand. In 2024, the historic center of Hamedan – including the Ecbatana site that also encompasses the tomb of Mordechai and Esther – was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Historically, Hamedan is identified with Ecbatana, one of the principal cities of the Achaemenid Empire. Dr. Tamar Eilam Gindin notes that Shushan served as the winter capital of the dynasty’s kings, while Ecbatana, that is Hamedan, was their summer capital.
And yet, there is another tradition as well. In the Upper Galilee, near Bar’am, there is another site known as the “Tomb of Mordechai and Esther.” According to this tradition, their bones were brought to the Land of Israel, apparently during the Persian period.
THE JEWISH community in Iran today is small, and continues to visit the tomb in Hamedan, mainly in the days before Purim. In the past, thousands of Jews from across the country would come there. Charvonah recounts that on “Shabbat Zakhor,” they would pray in the city’s synagogues, and afterwards come in shifts to the small chamber just to read the Zakhor passage in sequence, since only about twenty to thirty worshipers can crowd into the room at one time.
There is something almost disarming in the way this tomb does not try to impress. It is not monumental; it does not dominate its surroundings. It simply holds space.
Perhaps the real question is not where Mordechai and Esther are buried. Perhaps it is why, after empires collapsed, after dynasties vanished, after languages shifted and borders hardened, a low stone doorway in the middle of a crowded Iranian city still asks every visitor to bend.
To enter, one must lower the head. Not before kings, and not before flags – only before memory.
And somewhere between dust, brick, and a flicker of candle smoke, the story that once began “in the days of Ahasuerus” continues, quietly, to insist on being read, even when the readers themselves are no longer able to come.
Between Hamedan and Bar’am, between Ecbatana and the Galilee – between what scholarship can confirm and what memory insists upon – the tomb remains suspended in the air. Not as proof, but as presence.
And sometimes, presence is all that is needed.
The author is the owner of the blog Jewish Traveler – www.jewishtraveler.co.il/