Timur, whom English-speakers call Tamerlane, built an empire from Delhi to Damascus and died in February 1405 on the road to China. His campaigns killed millions of people. His wounds gave him his western name: about 1363 two arrows left him disabled in the right leg and right hand, and the Persian Timur-i Lang, Timur the Lame, became Tamerlane. He was buried at Gur-e-Amir in Samarkand, under a block of dark green jade. In June 1941 the Soviet Union sent scientists to open it.
The Horror
The order came from Stalin, according to the accounts. The expedition was led by the anthropologist Mikhail Gerasimov, who is known for rebuilding faces from skulls, and it was meant to confirm that the tomb really held Timur and to study the remains. Excavation began on June 16, 1941. The team included archaeologists, historians, a Pravda correspondent and a film crew.
Before they went down, the story goes, local elders tried to stop them. Wikipedia’s account says three old men brought the writer Sadriddin Ayni a manuscript claiming the tomb must not be opened. It was not ancient. It was a nineteenth-century book of local legends, the Jangnoma. Ayni is said to have waved them off, saying the curse had been invented after Timur’s death to deter grave robbers. The cameraman Malik Qayumov later told it differently, with the warning given to the crew in a teahouse. Ayni’s son confirmed the old men existed but disputed Qayumov’s version, partly because the manuscript was in Persian, a script Qayumov could not read.
The date of the opening is not settled. The sources give June 19, 20 and 21, and one popular retelling says June 22. This account follows June 20, the date used in the lead of the Wikipedia article on the curse, which suggests the spread may reflect time zones and a multi-day process.
What was found is better documented than what was said. The remains fitted the man: Gerasimov’s reconstruction gave a figure of about 172 cm who probably walked with a pronounced limp. Witnesses were later quoted describing a foul smell in the chamber and lights that went out and came back on, with an electrician unable to find the fault. These details are reported in retellings rather than documented, and none comes from a source that can be checked at first hand. No source confirms that the skeleton’s leg matched the old wound, so that rests on Gerasimov’s reported reconstruction alone.
Then the war. Operation Barbarossa began in the early hours of June 22, 1941. Whatever the true date of the opening, the invasion came within about two days of it. That gap is the entire basis of the curse.
The Curse
The legend has two inscriptions, and they need to be kept apart.
The first, “When I rise from the dead, the world shall tremble”, is attached to the tomb and is quoted in the Gur-e-Amir article. The second, “Whomsoever opens my tomb shall unleash an invader more terrible than I”, is the one that turns the story into a prophecy of Hitler. It is reported to have been found inside the coffin or on the slab. But the Wikipedia article on the curse states that no curse was carved on either, and that the coffin held a simple Islamic prayer while the slab listed Timur’s ancestors. People close to Gerasimov are reported as calling the story a fabrication. The first detailed Soviet publication of it that the article names dates from 1990, nearly half a century later.
Barbarossa was planned and ordered in 1940. The scientists cannot have caused it. The legend also grows in the telling. It says Stalin was warned, and sources disagree on by whom: some credit Gerasimov, while Qayumov claimed it was Marshal Zhukov. None of this is firm.
The reburial is where the story is often stretched. Timur’s remains were returned to Samarkand and reburied with Islamic rites, and one version says a special aircraft carried them, taking a detour over Stalingrad. The date is again disputed: the Gur-e-Amir article gives December 20, 1942, while the curse article and a popular blog say November. Popular versions place it in the same week as Operation Uranus, the Soviet encirclement of the German Sixth Army, which began on November 19. The curse article says plainly that the Soviet victory at Stalingrad came about five weeks after the reburial, not days, and that it was credited afterwards to the lifting of the curse.
The pattern is older than 1941. The article on the curse records that the Persian ruler Nader Shah took the jade slab from the tomb in 1740, that his son fell ill, and that the stone was returned on the advice of his counsellors. A cursed stone is a story that was told long before the Soviets arrived.
The Modern Relic
Gur-e-Amir still stands in Samarkand, in Uzbekistan, and visitors can walk in. The block of dark jade lies over Timur’s grave. Ulugh Beg, the grandson who finished the work, lies there in marble beside him. The warning about the dead rising is part of what guides tell tour groups. Whether they tell the 1941 story depends on the guide.
Timur’s remains were returned in 1942, so the man the Soviets lifted out is back where he lay. The curse has outlived the Soviet Union that was supposed to have suffered it. What survives is a coincidence of two days, a few contested inscriptions, and a great deal of retelling.
