This paper addresses the politics of public spaces of the city as sites of staging and negotiating a modern Persian identity. It suggests that in the 20th century Tehran, not only the modern appearance and order of the newly constructed boulevards and regulated facades of the brand-new public and administrative buildings were subjects of modernization, but also urban spaces of the city were seen as an opportunity for invention, projection and adjustment of collective memory, and public identity. This paper, particularly, focuses on the memorialization of the legendary Persian poet, Ferdowsi, as an iconic national hero in Ferdowsi Square of Tehran, as a venue of negotiation for establishing a fixed memory of the poet. It demonstrates the process of placing and replacing different statues, supported and financed by institutions inside and outside Iran, as each strove to stabilize the public memory that suited its interest. Proposed during the Ferdowsi millinery celebrations, the first statue installed in the Ferdowsi square was financed and commissioned by the Zoroastrian Parsee community of India. Like their other projects in Tehran, the process of creation, transportation and inauguration of the monument was an apparent attempt to revive Iran’s pre-Islamic memory for Zoroastrian diaspora community, as well as Iranian citizens. As the politics of representation has undergone theoretical transformation under the second Pahlavi, the statue was moved to another spot. During the next few years two other statues were installed in the square, all through elaborate ceremonies and public presence, aiming at “invention of tradition”. However the third statue was to remain there and develop into the most well-known symbolic image of Ferdowsi. Using archival documents, contemporary newspaper articles, and oral history, the paper highlights the debates and conflicts surrounding the iconographic, spatial and performative rhetoric embedded in the presentation of three different statues that were placed in the square from 1945 to 1969. It demonstrates the importance of public spaces of the city for the ruling elites of the Pahlavi regime, not only as sites of producing and polishing collective memory, but also as domains of practicing citizenship and modern national identity , specially for the new urban middle classes which were emerging in line of the new state policies.