Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s slain supreme leader, had seemed immovable for decades, a man whose authority had become so deeply woven into Iran’s political and religious life that imagining the country without him felt almost impossible.
Now Tehran — the capital from which he ruled, where he was killed and which had shaped his life — is the center of his final journey, filled with mourners for funeral ceremonies taking place across several days, which are part farewell, part spectacle and part turning point.
In the days leading up to the first public mourning, the city changed. First gradually, and then all at once, in the way cities often change before moments of consequence.
Families from provincial towns rolled into Tehran, joining masses who revered Ayatollah Khamenei as patriarch and guardian of the Islamic republic, an order that so many others had long opposed while suffering under its deep repression. Foreign officials, many from authoritarian nations, militia members and religious leaders flew from all over the world, reflecting both Iran’s global reach and its distance from the West.
We traveled there as well, the first visit by New York Times journalists to the country since before the United States and Israel attacked Iran in late February and the government cracked down brutally on protests that started in December. We found a country trying to project strength and stability but pervaded by uncertainty.
We arrived in Tehran, a dense city of around nine million that spreads outward in a sprawl of apartment blocks, glass towers and tree-lined boulevards, with neighborhoods that shift in character from one district to the next. Beside the pomp and circumstance, war-damaged buildings stood scarred along major roads and daily life was still shaped by water shortages and electricity blackouts. Families who lost loved ones in the crackdown were still living with grief — and hoping for justice.
As more people arrived, Ayatollah Khamenei’s presence seemed to expand with them. Across major highways and narrow alleys, in small cafes and sprawling bookstores, portraits of him began to cover the city.
Some show him young, with a dark beard and a stern expression. Others portray the older man many Iranians had grown used to seeing over decades, his beard turned white with age. In some, Ayatollah Khamenei appears beside Mojtaba, his son and successor, the pairing feeling less like a portrait than the passing of one chapter into the next.
The funeral preparations unfolded with the choreography of a major state event. Security checkpoints, organized transportation, public announcements, carefully arranged ceremonial spaces.
We were granted restricted access to the funeral ceremonies by the Iranian government, which closely controlled our movements, and which required a translator and guide to accompany us. It was a quiet reminder of how closely the story itself was being choreographed, and who was permitted to tell it.
The streets, too, were managed and staged.
Along Valiasr Street, where traffic usually performs its daily ritual of impatience and frustration, movement slowed as the roads gradually surrendered to the funeral preparations. Workers built stations to feed and give water to those arriving to mourn him.
Loudspeakers sent chants and laments through the air, and praised the supreme leader who was killed at the onset of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran.
A little farther away, at Enghelab Square, another version of Tehran moved beneath a giant mourning billboard.
Young women with uncovered hair and cigarettes in hand, and men with pierced ears, crossed paths with conservative women in black chadors carrying Iranian flags and praying quietly. It was an image that seemed to contain the contradictions of Iran itself: a nation Ayatollah Khamenei had shaped for decades, and one that, in his final years, had increasingly pushed back against the boundaries of his oppressive rule.
We lingered for almost two hours at the square, where most people were unwilling to talk to us, wary of foreign media. We asked to interview a woman with blond hair, a dark blue denim skirt, full makeup and a hijab barely resting at the edge of her hair. She smiled softly and said, “I am afraid I won’t be able to say what’s in my heart.”
At the square, some people stopped to photograph the giant statue of a clenched fist. Others kept walking and driving by. Every evening, life continued beneath the preparations, ordinary rhythms folding themselves into something much larger. Street vendors calling out, motorcycles weaving between cars, tea glasses clinking in small cafes.
Beneath the banners and portraits was another Tehran, a city worn by months of pressure.
A regional war with Israel last year compounded a financial malaise exacerbated by sanctions. Those economic frustrations boiled over into mass protests beginning in late December that the authorities crushed, killing thousands. Then came the war with the United States and Israel, taking the lives of young children at school, damaging historic sites like Golestan Palace and leaving residents checking the skies and refreshing news alerts. The past months had seemed to compress multiple eras of strain into a single season.
And states — especially autocratic ones like Iran’s — often answer uncertainty with scale.
So this exhausted capital has suddenly found itself transformed into the stage for a burial spectacle of extraordinary proportions.
At the Grand Mosalla, a sprawling mosque complex in Tehran, tens of thousands arrived this weekend dressed almost entirely in black to pray for and pay their respects to the Shiite Muslim patriarch. They cried and wailed openly. They struck their chests and heads in ritual mourning. Some sat on the ground, weary and stunned.
“Khamenei was the foundation of our lives,” said Mohamed Soleimani, from Tehran, who sat at the mosque’s grounds, head bowed, holding a photo of Mojtaba Khamenei.
Grief also gave way to anger. Fists rose in the air. Chants of revenge filled the space — directed at Israel, at the United States and, repeatedly, at one man whose name was taken up again and again by the crowd: Donald J. Trump.
The funeral, which will continue in the coming days through Tehran, other Iranian cities and even neighboring Iraq, seems designed to do something larger than simply bury a leader.
It is an effort to project continuity at a moment when the country itself seems caught in a period of transition and uncertainty.
So Iran moves forward for now, beneath commemorative banners and enormous portraits of Ayatollah Khamenei, still trying to understand what exactly is ending — and what is taking shape in its place.
