Over seven days his coffin travelled from Tehran to Qom, across the border to Najaf and Karbala, and home to Mashhad. The map below follows that route city by city.
Scroll to travel the route, click a city to jump to it, or use the controls to move between moments. For the day-by-day account of the ceremonies, see The Funeral — Timeline.
Scroll to follow the coffin
Families of martyrs gathered beside the Imam Khomeini Hussainiyah, where the flag of Imam Hussain's shrine was placed over his body. His coffin then lay in the Grand Mosalla beside the coffins of his four family members. Millions filed past, and foreign delegations from more than one hundred countries paid their respects one by one.
The coffin was carried across the capital along Damavand, Enqelab, and Azadi streets, the route of the great marches of the Revolution, through the people he had led for thirty-seven years.
The coffin travelled from the shrine of Fatimah Masumah, peace be upon her, to the Jamkaran Mosque. Qom is the city of his seminary years and the city where he taught after returning from Najaf. The funeral prayer was led by Ayatollah Javadi Amoli.
His coffin arrived at Najaf airport on July 7, received by Iraqi officials and scholars of the seminary where he studied as a young man. At dawn on July 8 the procession set out on foot for the shrine of Imam Ali, peace be upon him, six kilometres away. It lasted about seven hours, and the coffins were carried around the shrine before the prayer, led by the Najaf scholar Muhammad Taqi al-Hakim.
Iraq's Popular Mobilisation Forces put the crowd at more than 2.3 million. The day was declared a public holiday.
From Najaf the procession continued to Karbala, to the shrine of Imam Hussain, peace be upon him, and the shrine of Abbas ibn Ali. The flag of Imam Hussain's shrine had been placed over his body in Tehran on the first day of the farewell. The prayer was led by Sheikh Abdul Mahdi al-Karbalai, representative of Ayatollah Sistani.
Karbala authorities recorded around seven million mourners, and the return to Iran was delayed for hours by the size of the crowds. His four martyred family members were not carried with him into Najaf; while his coffin went on to the shrine of Imam Ali, they were given their own ceremony here in Karbala.
The journey ended where his life began. Fighter jets escorted the aircraft bearing the coffins to Mashhad, the city of his birth in 1939. When the crowds on Imam Reza Street grew too dense to pass, the coffins were carried the last stretch to the shrine by helicopter.
His eldest son, Sayyed Mostafa Khamenei, led the funeral prayer. After a private farewell, he was buried within the shrine of Imam Reza, peace be upon him, at the Dar al-Zikr riwaq. His grave was covered with rose petals.
