The Bab's execution in 1850 did not end the Persian state's campaign against his followers; after an attempted assassination of the Shah in 1852 by a small group of Babis acting, by most accounts, without any centrally sanctioned plan, Persian authorities launched a much broader wave of executions and mob violence against Babis across the country, killing large numbers of ordinary followers who had no connection to the assassination attempt, a persecution documented by foreign diplomats and travellers present in Persia at the time and remembered within Baha'i history as one of the formative traumas of the religion's earliest decades.
Baha'u'llah himself was imprisoned in Tehran during this same wave of persecution, an episode during which Baha'is believe he received his first intimations of his own prophetic mission, so that the violent aftermath of the Bab's martyrdom this entry describes is, in the Baha'i historical narrative, directly and causally connected to the beginning of Baha'u'llah's own religious calling, tying the solemn commemoration of the Bab's death to the very origin of the larger faith that grew out of the movement he had founded.
The golden dome that now crowns the Shrine of the Bab on Mount Carmel was not part of the original mausoleum built to receive his remains; it was added in stages under the guidance of Shoghi Effendi, the faith's appointed Guardian, with the distinctive gilded dome completed in 1953, decades after the Bab's remains were first interred there, so the building's now-iconic silhouette is a mid-twentieth-century addition to a much earlier structure.