The Baha'i faith's holiest place is where its founder was a prisoner

The Baha’i faith began in 19th-century Persia, and from its earliest years its leaders were treated as a threat. Its founder, Baha’u’llah, was driven from one place of exile to the next by Ottoman and Persian authorities, and in 1868 he was banished to the walled prison-city of Akka (Acre), in what is now northern Israel, a penal colony reserved for hard cases.

He never left the area again. After years of confinement he was eventually allowed to live just outside the city walls, at a country house called Bahji, where he died in 1892 and was buried.

That burial place is the surprising twist. The Shrine of Baha’u’llah at Bahji is now the single holiest spot on Earth for the world’s Baha’is. As the faith’s own institutions put it, the shrine “became the point of devotion on earth for Baha’is, the spot towards which they turn each day in prayer.”

A place of imprisonment became the qiblih, the fixed direction every Baha’i faces during obligatory daily prayer.

The symbolism is hard to miss. A man the empire tried to erase by locking him away in its grimmest port now anchors the spiritual geography of a religion with millions of followers. The wider complex of Baha’i holy places around Akka and Haifa was even inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008, the first modern religious tradition’s sites to earn that status, turning a sentence of exile into a place of pilgrimage.