Interactive Map of Stages in Bahá’u’lláh's Successive Exiles from Ṭihrán to ‘Akká
- How to Use the Interactive Map
- Navigation
Zoom using the mouse wheel, trackpad, or the + / – buttons
Click and drag (or swipe on mobile) to move around the map
- Symbols
- Tablet icons — cities where Tablets were revealed
Click a Tablet icon to open a detailed panel with historical information, residence dates, and a list of revealed Tablets. Click a Tablet title to open the Tablet
- Red pins — locations along the journey without listed Tablets
Click a red pin to view the location name
- Blue lines — the main route of exile
Follow the route from east to west to trace Bahá’u’lláh’s journey
- Red lines — the Sulaymaniyah detour
The Fourfold Journey
From 1853 until His passing in 1892, Bahá'u'lláh lived under an unbroken sentence of exile, and Shoghi Effendi read the trajectory as a single divinely-propelled movement whose stages corresponded to the unfolding of the Revelation itself. The first intimation came in the darkness of Tehran's Síyáh-Chál, after which He was banished to Baghdad in 1853. From Baghdad, on the eve of His second exile to Constantinople in 1863, came the declaration in the Garden of Riḍván. Banished onward to Adrianople — the only European soil ever to receive a Manifestation of God — He issued during five tempestuous years the proclamation of His mission to the kings and ecclesiastics of the earth: to Napoleon III, Queen Victoria, Czar Alexander II, Pope Pius IX, the Sultan, and the Sháh. The final exile, to the prison-fortress of ‘Akká in 1868, brought the consummation of the Revelation in the laws and ordinances of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, where He remained for twenty-four years.
The Reversal
What the Sháh's ministers and the Sultan's governors intended as erasure became the very means by which the Faith acquired its universal reach. ‘Abdu'l-Bahá stated the inversion plainly: "His enemies intended that His imprisonment should completely destroy and annihilate the blessed Cause, but this prison was, in reality, of the greatest assistance…. From this Prison His light was shed abroad; His fame conquered the world." Bahá'u'lláh Himself confirmed it: "The Almighty hath transformed this Prison-House into the Most Exalted Paradise." The journey stands in the lineage of Abraham's departure from Ur, Moses' exodus, and Muḥammad's hijrah — exiles whose apparent disgrace became the seed of a spiritual civilization.
