The Curse of Timur's Grave

This is the legendary resting place of Timur: [1]
The Gur-e-Amir mausoleum in Samarkand, Uzbekistan
Also known as Amir-Timur, Tamerlane, or “Timur the Lame”, Timur was a Turco-Mongol conqueror, known for founding the Timurid Empire which he reigned from 1370 to 1405, comprising what would be Central Asia and Iran. He was an abusive, yet extraordinarily savvy military tactician who envisioned himself as Genghis Khan’s heir. Timur was also a noted patron of the arts and architecture.
Timur, along with his descendants, were buried in a mausoleum, in what was then the capital of the Timurid Empire. The epitaph on Timur’s gravestone serves as a sort of warning to those who seem to disturb his presence: “whoever opens my tomb shall unleash an invader more terrible than I”.
It never really occurred to anyone to open Timur’s tomb until over five centuries later. In 1941, the Soviet archaeologist Mikhail Gerasimov and his team were sent on a state mission to open Timur’s tomb, as well as those of his relatives, in order to conduct a scientific study. At the time, Gerasimov was working at a military hospital in Tashkent, in the Uzbek SSR.
Within a matter of hours, Nazi Germany launched a surprise attack on the Soviet Union, resulting in the deaths of 26 million people. A year later, Joseph Stalin ordered that Timur's remains be buried back in Samarkand in accordance of Islamic tradition — and not long after that, the German army surrendered at Stalingrad.
Photo from 1941 depicting the excavation by Soviet archaeologists of Miran Shah, Timur’s son
There are also rumors that the tomb could be “cursed”. When some of the Samarkand inhabitants initially heard of this plan, they were reportedly petrified[2] and warned the team about the curse supposedly attached to Timur’s epitaph and grave — but the anthropologists dismissed it as superstition.
I strongly doubt that the tomb was actually cursed — rather, the connection between the tomb’s epitaph and the invasion of the USSR was a coincidence.
And quite a mind-blowing coincidence, indeed.

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