The vast site, called Behesht-e Zahra , or “Zahra’s paradise,” after a female Shiite saint, is the city’s main cemetery, and it is busy, with about 15,000 visitors, and 150 funerals, a day. Over an average weekend, half a million people come to picnic near the graves of family members, famous artists and martyrs from the 1979 Islamic revolution and the war with Iraq.
The cemetery, one of the largest in the world, is also getting crowded underground. In the four decades that Behesht-e Zahra has been receiving the dead, it has become the final resting place for about 1.6 million people. But with the graves filling up quickly and little space left for expansion, the graveyard is running out of room.
