Central Shaheed Minar (কেন্দ্রীয় শহীদ মিনার)

The Central Shaheed Minar is Bangladesh's national memorial to the martyrs of the 1952 Language Movement, in the Dhaka University area beside Dhaka Medical College Hospital. It is the focus of Ekushey February and International Mother Language Day each 21 February, and it is open to visitors at any time without a ticket.

The language martyrs of February 1952

The minar commemorates the people killed on 21 and 22 February 1952, when police opened fire on students and activists demanding official status for Bengali in what was then East Pakistan. Students of Dhaka Medical College built the first memorial overnight on 23 February 1952, planned mainly by Dr Sayeed Haider, with materials paid for by Pearu Sardar. Police pulled it down on 26 February. A new minar rose on the same spot in 1954.

Hamidur Rahman's design and its 1963 completion

Work on a larger design by Hamidur Rahman, with Novera Ahmed, began in 1957, stalled under martial law and was completed in 1963, when Hasina Begum, mother of the martyr Abul Barkat, inaugurated it. A basement mural of about 140 square metres told the story of the Language Movement. The Pakistan Army destroyed the monument and the murals during Operation Searchlight in March 1971. After independence the minar was rebuilt, and in 1983 it was renovated and lined with marble, with further expansion in the mid-1980s. In 2010 the High Court directed the Public Works Department to add the museum and library of Hamidur Rahman's original plan.

A mother with her fallen sons and a red rising sun

The monument stands about 14 metres tall: a half-circle of slender columns on a raised, stepped platform, with the central column bowing forward at the top. It is read as a mother standing with her fallen sons, with a red disc behind the columns for the rising sun. The marble floor was designed to catch the moving shadows of the columns. Two statues stand at the entrance, and lines of poetry run along the fences.