Qualla: Polish Cemetery in Bandar-e Anzali

Polish Cemetery in Bandar-e Anzali: Introduction

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Karol Tofil, CC BY-SA 2.5. The padlocked gate reads CMENTARZ POLSKI in large iron letters. Behind it, 639 headstones stand in precise rows on a narrow strip of land between the Caspian Sea and the streets of Bandar-e Anzali, a humid port town in northern Iran that most Poles had never heard of before the spring of 1942. That year, tens of thousands of starving, typhus-ravaged refugees stumbled off Soviet oil tankers and coal ships into a makeshift tent city on this shore, having crossed the Caspian in one of the war's most desperate evacuations. The cemetery is what remains of those who did not survive the crossing or the diseases that followed, a sliver of Poland pressed into Iranian soil by circumstances no one could have predicted.

Image: Karol Tofil | CC BY-SA 2.5

Polish Cemetery in Bandar-e Anzali: The Long Road from Siberia

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Karol Tofil, CC BY 2.5. The story begins not in Iran but in the frozen labor camps of the Soviet Union. After the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland in September 1939, Stalin's regime deported an estimated 1.5 million Polish citizens to Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Central Asia. Families were separated. Thou...

Image: Karol Tofil | CC BY 2.5

Polish Cemetery in Bandar-e Anzali: Landfall on the Caspian

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Karol Tofil, CC BY 2.5. Between March and October 1942, approximately 115,000 Polish soldiers and civilians crossed the Caspian Sea from the Turkmen port of Krasnovodsk to Bandar-e Anzali, then known as Pahlevi. The Iranian and British officials watching the first ships list into harbor on March 25 had ...

Image: Karol Tofil | CC BY 2.5

Polish Cemetery in Bandar-e Anzali: Stones and Names

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Karol Tofil, CC BY 2.5. At the center of the cemetery stands a tall rectangular column of white marble, engraved with a Polish eagle. Below the eagle, inscriptions in English and Polish honor the dead. Eighteen concrete headstones line each row, recording names, birth dates, death dates, and military ra...

Image: Karol Tofil | CC BY 2.5

Polish Cemetery in Bandar-e Anzali: Iran's Forgotten Hospitality

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Karol Tofil, CC BY 2.5. The Polish cemetery is a physical reminder of a chapter rarely taught in either Polish or Iranian history. Iran took in tens of thousands of desperate refugees at a time when the country itself was under Allied occupation and struggling with its own wartime shortages. Isfahan bec...

Image: Karol Tofil | CC BY 2.5