A Sacred House, Erased Three Times

The House of the Bab did not survive the century and a half between the declaration of 1844 and the present largely intact; it was damaged and repaired more than once as Babis and, later, Baha'is faced recurring waves of persecution in Iran, with the building itself expanded and restored under Baha'i administration in the early twentieth century specifically so it could receive the pilgrims who were by then traveling to it as one of the faith's three obligatory points of pilgrimage. That restoration effort ended in September 1979, months after the Islamic Revolution, when Iranian authorities ordered the house demolished; the site was subsequently leveled and paved into a public square, so that a pilgrim standing on the spot today finds no structure at all, only the historical fact of what once stood there.

Baha'i institutions have continued to designate the empty site as a point of pilgrimage in principle even though there is nothing standing left to visit, which makes the House of the Bab an unusual case among this atlas's sacred sites: a place whose religious significance now rests entirely on documented memory and on the community's continued designation, with the physical object that originally earned that designation deliberately removed by state action. Baha'i communities worldwide maintain detailed models and architectural records of the house as it stood, preserving its layout even without the building itself, a form of memorial common to communities whose holiest sites have been destroyed by hostile authorities rather than lost to time or accident.