Hariree House

When Dr. Hariri’s 19th-century mansion was designated a national monument in 1999, officials faced a dilemma: how to preserve a Qajar-era house whose walls were covered in murals so vivid they set it apart from every other historic home in Tabriz. The solution arrived in 2017, when the Azerbaijan Press Museum moved into the first floor, giving new life to rooms where painted figures still gaze from niches and muqarnas ceilings hover overhead, a press archive housed within painted walls that may predate the printing press’s own arrival in the region.

The house takes its name from the merchant who built it, one of Tabriz’s well-known traders during the early Qajar period, though the specific goods that built his fortune have gone the way of most 19th-century ledgers: undocumented. What survives instead are the murals, scenes of Persian mythology and Quranic stories layered across walls that outlasted both the merchant’s business and the empire he did business under. The museum downstairs now catalogs newspapers and printing history in a building whose own decorative record predates the presses it commemorates, which is either an irony or simply how old houses tend to work.