Nishapur

One of the four great cities of Khurasan and a jewel of medieval Persia, seat of madrasas, Sufi lodges, and turquoise mines. Omar Khayyam was born here in 1048 and is buried here, as he predicted, where the north wind scatters blossoms over the grave: mathematician, calendar reformer, astronomer, and the poet of doubt whose quatrains the world reads still.

Nishapur was one of the four great cities of Khurasan, rich from the eastern road and from turquoise mined in the hills nearby. It was levelled by earthquake and then by the Mongols, so what stands now is a later town. Khayyam worked here on cubic equations and on a calendar more accurate than the Gregorian one that followed it five centuries later. The quatrains that made him famous in English were probably not all his, and his own age knew him as a mathematician.