S6E6: A Shrine Online: The Case of Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin, with Keelan Overton

In the city of Varamin, some 50km southwest of Tehran, lies the Shrine and Mausoleum of Emamzadeh Yahya, a site of pilgrimage and veneration for Shi’i Muslims.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries many of the shrine’s tiles and its mihrab were looted and dispersed in museums around Europe and North America.

The focus of this podcast is the project, supported by The Barakat Trust, that has sought to reunite the disconnects that have long afflicted this site, its worshippers, and audience. The project is an online museological intervention in the form of a website that combines many aspects of the shrine, from its architectural features to ritual practices, from an urban history of the city to the stories of the shrine’s keepers and attendants.

The website includes galleries that explores these aspects of the shrine through essays, videos, and photo exhibitions.

The website is interactive, regularly updated, and available in Persian and English:

https://khamseen-emamzadeh-yahya-varamin.hart.lsa.umich.edu/

The leader of the project and guest on this month’s episode is Keelan Overton. She led a team of over 50 individuals who collaboratively contributed to the creation of this project that experimented with format, media, and technology to connect audiences in Iran and beyond to Emamzadeh Yahya and his shrine.

Keelan Overton is an art historian trained at Williams College and UCLA (PhD 2011). Since 2015 she has been an independent scholar. My first book project was the Iran-Deccan edited volume published by IUP in 2020. She then transitioned immediately into the Emamzadeh Yahya project, which she has directed and produced from her home office since 2021.

This episode is part of our series Peripheries which seeks to push our understanding of the cultural heritage of the Islamic world away from the traditional centres that we associate with it. With a fantastic range of guests we will examine places and topics often considered peripheral to the Islamic world and understand why they are in fact of central importance to the region’s cultural heritage, from Armenia to England, from Ethiopia to West Africa.