Operation Barbarossa began within days of the exhumation of Tamerlane’s remains by a Soviet archaeologist, and the Soviet victory at Stalingrad occurred days after their reinterment.

The story goes that Tamerlane’s tomb was inscribed with a curse to the effect that disturbing the remains would “unleash the demons of war”. Other versions merely state that the curse was a common belief among the people of Samarkand at the time that the remains were exhumed.

Was there a curse, or was this element of the story invented after the event?