Treasury of National Jewels

The treasury's strength is depth within an extremely narrow category: state and dynastic regalia and loose stones assembled by two successive Iranian dynasties, almost entirely through 18th-century conquest rather than purchase or gift. It is not encyclopedic and does not attempt to be; there is no comparative jewelry history on display, little context for the Mughal, Safavid or European trade routes the stones passed through before reaching Iran, and almost no English-language interpretation beyond what a guide says aloud. Its case for a visit rests entirely on the concentration and rarity of a small number of objects, most conquered rather than commissioned, in one room.

The Treasury of National Jewels is not a purpose-built museum. It occupies a vault beneath the Central Bank of Iran's original headquarters on Ferdowsi Street in central Tehran, a modernist building the bank used as its main office until it moved to a new tower in the north of the city in the 2000s. The old Ferdowsi Street building passed to Bank Melli Iran, but the Central Bank kept the vault and the collection inside it, and the treasury still gives its address as No. 140 Ferdowsi Avenue, at the corner of the Istanbul Crossroad near Imam Khomeini Square. A visitor descends three flights of stairs into the vault itself; there is no elevator.

The collection the vault holds was assembled mostly by two dynasties. The Safavids accumulated much of it through the 16th and 17th centuries, until Afghan invaders sacked Isfahan in 1722 and scattered the royal treasury. Nader Shah, who fought his way to the Iranian throne in the 1730s, rebuilt it many times over by conquest, above all his 1739 sack of Delhi, which brought Mughal diamonds, spinels and a fortune in loose stones back to Iran. What Nader Shah brought home, and what later Qajar and Pahlavi rulers commissioned from it, is substantially what is still in the vault today.

Formal state custody dates to 1937, when Reza Shah Pahlavi placed the royal jewels under Bank Melli Iran, then the national bank, partly so their value could back Iran's currency. When the Central Bank of Iran was created in 1960 to take over that role, the jewels and their vault went with it, and the Central Bank has been the treasury's legal custodian and administrator ever since. The museum in its current form, open to paying visitors rather than reserved for the state's own reserve accounting, dates to 1955.

English-language guidebooks and tour operators almost universally describe a Peacock Throne on display in Tehran. There is a genuine version-safety problem hiding inside that sentence, and it is worth untangling before anything else, because it runs through the whole collection.

The original Peacock Throne was a Mughal object, built in India in the 17th century and famous for gem-set peacocks on its canopy. Nader Shah's army took it from Delhi in 1739. It did not survive him: when Nader Shah was assassinated by his own officers in 1747, the throne disappeared in the chaos that followed, almost certainly broken up for its stones. No structural part of it is known to survive anywhere, in Iran or elsewhere; only some of its individual gems are thought to have been reworked into later pieces.

What the Central Bank actually holds are two different, later Iranian thrones, both made for the Qajar ruler Fath-Ali Shah in the early 19th century, two generations after Nader Shah. The Sun Throne, a platform throne with a radiant sun disk on its headboard, was built for Fath-Ali Shah's own coronation and was also used for his marriage to a consort named Tavus Khanum, Persian for Lady Peacock; that wedding is very likely the real source of the throne's popular but misleading English name. It carries no peacock imagery at all. The Naderi Throne, a portable, chair-form throne that disassembles into twelve pieces for travel, has an even more direct false etymology: despite its name, it has no connection whatsoever to Nader Shah. It derives instead from the Persian word nader, meaning rare or unique, and was built decades after Nader Shah's death. Both thrones were carried in Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's 1967 coronation, the last time either was used in a state ceremony, and both are now in the treasury rather than at Golestan Palace, where they were kept until 1980.

This is not a pedantic point. A reader planning a visit, or citing this collection in research, who goes looking for the Mughal Peacock Throne in Tehran will not find it, because it no longer exists anywhere. What they will find are two later, genuinely spectacular Qajar thrones that borrowed its reputation along with, in the Naderi Throne's case, some of the same diamonds and spinels Nader Shah brought back from the same campaign.

Two pink diamonds anchor the loose-stone gallery. The Darya-ye Noor, Persian for Sea of Light, is an estimated 182 carats, cut flat in the old Mughal tabiz style rather than faceted, and remains the largest known diamond of its rare pale pink color anywhere in the world. The Noor-ol-Ain, roughly 60 carats and the same pale pink, is mounted as the centerpiece of a platinum tiara that Harry Winston built for Empress Farah Pahlavi's 1958 wedding, ringed by 324 further pink, yellow and white diamonds. Both stones trace back to Nader Shah's 1739 conquests, and a 1965 study proposed that they were once a single larger diamond, the Great Table stone recorded by the French jeweler Jean-Baptiste Tavernier at the Mughal court in 1642, later cut in two.

The Samarian Spinel, a 500-carat unfaceted red-brown stone, is the largest of its kind known and carries a 17th-century inscription naming the Mughal emperor Jahangir, alongside a drilled hole that 19th-century court legend, recorded in the diary of Naser al-Din Shah's own physician, linked to a chain that once hung around the neck of the biblical golden calf. A smaller, 270-carat companion spinel came into Iran the same way, part of the same Delhi haul.

Three crowns anchor the regalia hall. The Kiani Crown, commissioned under the Qajar dynasty's founder Agha Mohammad Khan and set with about 1,800 pearls, 1,800 rubies and 300 emeralds on a red velvet cap, served every Qajar coronation from 1796 to 1925 and was still carried, unworn, at Reza Shah's 1926 coronation. The Pahlavi Crown, made new for that same 1926 ceremony, gave the incoming dynasty its own regalia rather than borrowed Qajar symbols. The Empress's Crown, made by Van Cleef and Arpels for Farah Pahlavi's coronation as Shahbanu in 1967, marks the only time an Iranian empress consort was ever formally crowned.

At the far end of the treasury hall stands the collection's largest set-piece object: a gem-covered globe commissioned by Naser al-Din Shah Qajar in 1869, roughly 110 centimeters tall on a 66 centimeter base and set with about 52,000 stones. Emeralds mark the oceans, and rubies, spinels and diamonds pick out the continents and, in places, individual cities. Unlike the crowns and thrones, the globe was never regalia for a single ruler to wear; visitor accounts and the museum's own presentation treat it as a standalone display of Qajar-era wealth and craft.

The rest of the collection fills out around these set pieces: Nader Shah's own sword and shield, a dozen further jeweled swords and shields from later reigns, a gold and emerald ceremonial belt, a jeweled coronation cape worn at a Pahlavi coronation, a royal mace roughly 73 centimeters long set end to end with spinels and diamonds, its largest stone a 17-carat diamond ringed by six 40-carat spinels, and a run of jeweled serving dishes and a covered ceremonial chest from the Qajar court.

The treasury has spent most of the years since 2019 shut rather than open, and that pattern is itself part of the record. It closed in March 2019 as the coronavirus outbreak reached Iran. The closure ran long enough, and was accompanied by so little public information, that rumors began to circulate online that pieces of the collection, specifically two crowns, had gone missing; Iran's tourism minister publicly called on the treasury to reopen in January 2023, describing the jewels as a chance for the public to see the beauty and craft of a royal lifestyle the 1979 revolution had ended, without directly addressing the rumors. The Ministry of Cultural Heritage eventually sent officials to inspect and photograph the vault before a reopening, specifically to show the disputed crowns were still there.

Tehran Times reported the treasury reopening after 51 months closed in a report dated June 2024, and again reported a fresh reopening, this time dated to 31 May 2025, with admission set at 300,000 tomans for foreign visitors, 30,000 tomans for Iranian nationals and 15,000 tomans for students with valid identification, and visiting hours of 10:00 to 12:00, Saturday to Tuesday. Persian-language reporting from the same period describes the treasury closing again within weeks of that 2025 reopening, citing the security situation in the country, and describes a further closure planned for construction work later the same year. However those individual episodes reconcile, the pattern across five years is consistent: repeated announced reopenings, each followed within months by another closure.

As of the most recent check of the Central Bank's own Treasury page, on 18 September 2026, that page states in plain terms that the Treasury of National Jewels is closed until further notice. No reopening date is published. The hours, admission fees and phone numbers on that same page, reproduced on this record, are the last figures the Central Bank itself has posted, and they are the figures a reader should expect to see restored first if and when the vault reopens, not figures that can be relied on to book a visit today.

On the days the treasury has been open, the process has been consistent across several years of visitor accounts. Tickets are sold only in person, at the treasury itself, until the counter closes half an hour before the viewing window ends; there has never been an online booking system. Before entry, visitors hand over phones, cameras, bags, smart watches, lighters and any other personal items at a Depository Counter and pass through a security inspection gate; nothing goes inside except the body and, if bought at the on-site shop, the museum's own printed guidebook, since wall labelling in English is thin. A museum guide leads small groups through the halls in a single circuit, typically 30 to 40 minutes, delivered in Persian and English on the days multilingual staff are on duty. Visitors are told not to touch the cases; several accounts describe an alarm system that makes the point immediately if anyone forgets.

What comes through most consistently in visitor reviews, aggregating to a 4.6 out of 5 score across more than 1,500 Tripadvisor ratings, is genuine astonishment at the density of the collection: reviewers describe not having seen so much jewelry and so many precious stones assembled in one place anywhere else in the world, and name the Darya-ye Noor, the Globe of Jewels and the two Qajar thrones as the pieces that stay with them afterward. A first-person account published in Tehran Times in October 2020 called the experience jaw-dropping and urged visitors to make it a priority on any trip to the city, while documenting the same strict security routine visitors still describe years later. Set against that, the recurring complaints are just as consistent: no photography allowed at all, a visiting window historically as narrow as two hours on four days a week, three flights of stairs with no elevator or escalator, and, cutting across all of it, a treasury that for long stretches of the past several years has simply not been open to see.

Visitors consistently rank the Treasury among the most extraordinary single-room jewel collections anywhere, comparing it favourably to the British Crown Jewels and the Kremlin's Diamond Fund, while also consistently flagging how restrictive and unpredictable a visit is: no photography, a two-hour opening window on four days a week, no online booking, no elevator down the stairs into the vault, and, since 2019, a pattern of closures that has left the museum shut more often than open.