The Báb declared in 1844 that he was the gate to one greater who would follow, and the movement spread so fast that the Persian state responded with mass executions. He was shot by a firing squad in Tabriz in 1850 — the tradition reports that the first volley severed only his ropes — and roughly twenty thousand followers were killed in the years around it. His remains were hidden for decades and eventually enshrined on Mount Carmel under the gold dome that is now the Faith's most photographed building.