Who ruled Tehran?

Tehran spreads across the southern slopes of the Alborz mountains in northern Iran, with the snow-capped cone of Mount Damavand to the north-east and the edge of the central desert to the south. Streams and underground channels called qanats brought mountain water to the plain, which supported villages and gardens. For most of history the great city of this district was Rey, a few kilometres to the south; Tehran was a village that became a town only in the late Middle Ages. Its defining moment came in 1786, when the Qajar dynasty made it the capital of Iran, and it has since been the stage for most of the country's modern political upheavals.

Rey, known to the Greeks as Rhages, was a major city of ancient Media and is named in Zoroastrian scripture. It passed through the hands of the Achaemenid Empire, Alexander and the Seleucids, the Parthians and the Sasanians, and in 641 the last Sasanian king, Yazdegerd III, is said to have appealed for resistance from here before fleeing east. Under the Abbasid caliphs Rey ranked among the great cities of the Islamic world, and the caliph Harun al-Rashid was born there. Tehran is mentioned in the ninth and tenth centuries as one of its villages. When the Mongols sacked Rey in 1220 its people scattered, and many settled in Tehran, which slowly took its place.

The Safavid shah Tahmasp I gave Tehran its first walls and a bazaar in the mid-sixteenth century, and later Safavid rulers built gardens and a palace there. In the eighteenth century Karim Khan Zand built a residence in Tehran but ruled from Shiraz. Agha Mohammad Khan, founder of the Qajar dynasty, chose Tehran as his capital in 1786, partly because it lay close to his tribe's homeland and to the contested Caucasus frontier with Russia.

Under the Qajars the city grew around the Golestan Palace and the Grand Bazaar. Naser al-Din Shah, who reigned from 1848 to 1896, extended the walls in the 1860s and 1870s and introduced the country's first modern college, telegraph offices and a short railway. The Constitutional Revolution of 1905 to 1911 was fought largely in Tehran's streets and mosques, leading to Iran's first parliament in 1906. After 1925 Reza Shah, founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, tore down the walls and gates, cut wide avenues through the old fabric and built ministries, a university and a national railway station.

During the Second World War Allied forces occupied Iran, and in 1943 Tehran hosted the conference at which Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill met together for the first time. In 1953 a coup backed by Britain and the United States overthrew the prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. Oil wealth and migration from the countryside made Tehran a sprawling metropolis under Mohammad Reza Shah, and mass demonstrations in its streets brought down the monarchy in the revolution of 1979, creating the Islamic Republic of Iran. The city was struck by Iraqi missiles in the war of 1980 to 1988, by Israeli airstrikes in a twelve-day war in June 2025, and again by bombing during further fighting in 2026. Tehran has about nine million people, with well over fifteen million in its metropolitan area, by far the largest urban area in the country.