Numerous biographic dictionaries (tazkira) have been compiled to commemorate Muslim saints, poets, great men, and Sufis throughout the Islamic world. Recent scholarly attention has explored the development of tazkira writing in the early modern era, portraying it as a process of place-making, commemoration, and pre-nationalist identity formation. While these investigations have underscored the value of tazkiras as sources in literary, political, and cultural studies, their significance in the historiography of architecture and urbanism remains largely unexplored. This paper aims to concentrate on Persian panegyric-tazkiras, commissioned biographic dictionaries of poets, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as manifestations of a new social and political order in post-Safavid Iran. Anchoring this analysis at the intersection of urban and architectural patronage and tazkira commissions, the paper highlights the intertwined matrix of material and immaterial legacies and memories recorded and revived in tazkiras and the built environment. This research centers on the production of Madayeh al-Husayniyya (Tazkira-yi Baqi), commissioned by Isfahan’s governor, Mohammad Husayn Khan Sadr-i Isfahani on the eve of the nineteenth century. In addition to introducing this untapped manuscript held at the Majlis Library in Iran, the paper examines understudied visual documents, including maps and engravings of Isfahan in the early Qajar period, to reconstruct the architectural activities under Sadr-i Isfahani. This approach sheds light on key concepts and complexities at the intersection of individual/community, royal/non-royal, center/periphery, local/transregional, and textual/spatial in the post-Safavid city. Besides mining illuminating information on buildings, urban spaces, and architectural activities, the paper highlights the conceptual and formal interconnectedness of textual representations and physical transformations of the city. It suggests that Persian panegyric-tazkiras produced a unique way of negotiating social and political status and crafting a public image for non-royal urban elites in post-Safavid Iran. This study revisits current scholarship on post-Safavid urbanism and architecture, challenging the perception of it as an eventless period and emphasizing the architectural agency of lesser patrons in the city. Considering the prevalence of tazkira writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across the Islamic world, further research will expand this method as a viable approach to bridge the gap between literary studies and urban history.