Türkiye's vice president stood before the coffin in Tehran and recited a prayer. Cevdet Yılmaz, representing President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, joined the state ceremony on Friday for Ali Khamenei, Iran's late supreme leader, who was killed in a joint US-Israeli strike on 28 February 2026.
The ceremony was held at the Imam Khomeini Mosalla in the Iranian capital. Yılmaz came with Deputy Foreign Minister Musa Kulaklıkaya, Türkiye's ambassador to Tehran Hicabi Kırlangıç, and a group of Turkish lawmakers. The Turkish presence crossed party lines: representatives of the CHP, the Felicity Party, the Great Unity Party, the New Welfare Party, the Future Party, the Free Cause Party and the Patriotic Party all attended.
Khamenei's body had been brought to a farewell ceremony the night before, according to Iran's state agency IRNA, to a site near where he was killed, where thousands of relatives of those who died in the February attacks had gathered. Delegations from close to 100 countries came for the memorial, among them Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.
The rites run for a week. After the memorial, farewell ceremonies continue in Tehran on 4 and 5 July, with the main procession through the capital on 6 July. The cortege then moves to the holy city of Qom on 7 July and into Iraq on 8 July, with stops in Baghdad, Najaf and Karbala. The burial is set for 9 July at the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad, one of Shia Islam's holiest sites.
Iranian officials have said the funeral could draw up to 20 million mourners, which would make it the largest in the country's history. The BBC reported that Tehran ordered public and private offices closed from Saturday and shut most of the city center to traffic, with the airspace over the capital closing in stages.
Not everyone is turning out. The Times of Israel, citing AFP interviews with Iranians reached from Paris, reported quiet Tehran streets, night checkpoints back in place, and roads out of the city jammed with people leaving. Some of those interviewed doubted the official turnout figure and put the real number far lower; others objected to the spending on the ceremony while, they said, the price of bread had climbed. Those are individual residents' accounts, and the government's own figure is an expectation rather than a count.
Khamenei was succeeded by his son Mojtaba, who, the BBC noted, has not appeared in public since taking the post.
Iran has done this before, and the memory shapes the planning. When the republic's founder, Ruhollah Khomeini, was buried in 1989, the crowd overwhelmed the cortege, the shroud tore, and a helicopter had to lift the body clear before he could be buried the next day. An Iranian who was there, Abbas Perverdeh, told Anadolu Ajansı that reaching the coffin was treated as a duty, which is why the crush happened. Now, he said, the authorities keep the casket high and guarded, out of the crowd's reach.