Updated November 2026 Details of the 2015 restoration checked, and the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art has reopened after its wartime closure earlier this year.
The Golden Palm in Mellat Park is one of Tehran’s most striking pieces of public art, and one of the least explained. Created by the Finnish sculptor Eila Hiltunen, best known for the Sibelius Monument in Helsinki, the gleaming metal palm has stood on a rise in the park since 1975, when the park itself was newly laid out and still largely bare ground.
Mellat Park, which opened before the revolution as the Imperial Park and was renamed afterwards, runs along the west side of Valiasr Street in north Tehran, towards Chamran Expressway. It remains one of the city’s best-loved green spaces, with a pool, a musical fountain, an old steam locomotive and the Mellat cinema complex. The palm is easy to miss if you stick to the main paths, so it is worth heading uphill to find it.
Hiltunen chose the palm because of what it means in Iran, where it has long stood for blessing, endurance and life in a dry land. Rather than carve a literal tree, she built an abstract form in welded metal, with three tube-like trunks rising into a spray of fronds. You can step inside the space beneath them, and the effect is close to the organ-pipe rhythm of her Sibelius Monument, completed in 1967.
Four decades of weather and use took their toll. The original golden finish darkened until the sculpture looked almost black, some fronds broke, and park visitors had taken to using the lower leaves as exercise bars. In 2015, during the 150th anniversary year of Sibelius’s birth and the 90th anniversary of relations between Iran and Finland, Tehran’s municipality commissioned a full restoration. The Iranian sculptor Ebrahim Eskandari spent around six months repairing and polishing the piece under the supervision of Finnish experts, remaking damaged fronds and cleaning carefully around Hiltunen’s original welds. Lighting was added at the base, so the palm now glows gold after dark. It was unveiled again that September in the presence of Finnish and Iranian officials, and locals have called it the Golden Palm ever since.
The palm is one of a small number of works by foreign artists in Tehran’s public spaces, and most of the rest are found at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA). Opened in 1977 on the western edge of Laleh Park, the museum was designed by Kamran Diba, who reworked traditional Iranian ideas such as the windcatcher and the sunken courtyard into a modern concrete building. Much of it lies below ground, and the galleries are linked by a spiralling ramp.
TMoCA holds more than 3,000 works, including what is widely regarded as the most important collection of Western modern art outside Europe and North America, assembled mainly in the 1970s. Picasso, Pollock, Warhol, Hockney, Renoir and Rothko are all represented, alongside a major collection of Iranian modern art. Leave time for the sculpture garden, where you can see pieces by Henry Moore, Alberto Giacometti, Max Ernst and René Magritte, including a bronze version of Magritte’s Le Thérapeute. Minimalist works by Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt’s Open Cube are also in the collection.
The museum closed during the war that began at the end of February 2026 and reopened in the spring with a rotating programme of small exhibitions, so check what is on before you go. If you have time for a second museum, the National Art Museum of Iran downtown is far less visited and well worth an hour.
Mellat Park is at its best in the late afternoon, when families come out and the palm catches the low sun. Combine it with a walk along Valiasr Street, then cross town to Laleh Park for TMoCA on another day.
