The gaze of history on old Tehran

After his death, Karim Khan Zand was succeeded by the Qajar ruler Agha Mohammad Khan. The Qajars were a Turkic tribe who held ancestral lands in present-day Azerbaijan (then part of Iran) and Agha Mohammad Khan in 1786 established his dynasty’s capital in Tehran, a city geographically close to the Caucasian territories. (To read more about Azerbaijan and the Caucasus, click here.) Tehran’s population more than tripled in just a decade, reaching 50,000 by 1796.