The Feyziyeh School was founded during the Safavid era, with an epigraph on the south veranda dating its construction to the reign of Shah Tahmasp in the 16th century. Before it was called Feyziyeh, a school named Astana occupied the same site, operating from roughly the 12th to the 17th century. The Safavids rebuilt it and gave it its current name. Fath-Ali Shah Qajar expanded the school again in 1799, adding rooms and verandas that still define its layout: 40 rooms on the first floor, 4 long verandas, 12 stalls, and a square pool at its center. For centuries it functioned as a seminary, training Shia clerics within sight of the Fatima Masumeh Shrine. Its proximity to Iran's holiest shrine in Qom made it inseparable from the city's identity as a center of religious authority.

In 1963, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi announced the White Revolution, a sweeping package of reforms that included land redistribution, women's suffrage, and the nationalization of forests. Members of the Iranian clergy were particularly angered by the land reforms, which threatened the economic base of religious endowments. The Shah traveled to Qom and, in a public speech, called the clergy "black reactionaries" worse than the communist Tudeh Party and "a hundred times more treacherous." On 26 January 1963, a referendum to legitimize the White Revolution passed overwhelmingly -- 5,598,711 votes in favor, 4,115 against -- though the opposition boycotted it. The lopsided result gave the government a mandate to escalate.

On 22 March 1963, coinciding with the commemorative death day of the Shia Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq, the Shah's forces attacked the Feyziyeh School. Students and bystanders were killed. The assault on a religious seminary during a sacred commemoration was calculated to intimidate, but it achieved the opposite. Khomeini declared the Iranian new year of 1963 a day of public mourning. Rage simmered for months. When Khomeini delivered his Ashura sermon at the school on June 3, he channeled that anger into a direct confrontation with the monarchy, warning the Shah that the day would come when the people would celebrate his departure from the country.

Two days after the sermon, at 3 a.m. on June 5, 1963, police and commandos entered Khomeini's home in Qom and placed him under arrest. They transferred him to Qasr Prison in Tehran. The arrest triggered the Movement of 15 Khordad -- named for its date on the Iranian calendar -- which brought protesters into the streets across Iran. The government suppressed the uprising violently, but the political dynamic had permanently shifted. Khomeini, previously one voice among many clerical critics, became the central figure of opposition to the Shah. The Feyziyeh School, which had spent centuries quietly training scholars, became a symbol of resistance. Iran listed it as a national monument in January 2008, and its image has appeared on the country's banknotes -- the building that helped ignite a revolution, enshrined in the currency of the state that revolution created.