Shiraz

Iran's major cities:
Tehran
Shiraz
Isfahan
Mashhad
Tabriz

Shiraz, capital of the province of Fars, southwestern Iran, lies in a fold of the Zagros Mountains. It has a population of 965,117 (1991). Shiraz is famous as a cultural center. Cement, sugar, fertilizers, textiles, and handicrafts (especially carpets and mosaics) are manufactured. The city was the birthplace of the poets Mohammed Shamsoddin Hafez and Sheykh Moslehoddin Sadi, whose superb garden tombs are on the northern edge of the city. Among the city's many fine buildings are mosques from the 9th and 13th centuries. The ancient site of Persepolis is to the northeast.
Shiraz became an important center as early as the 4th century BC, but it attained its greatest prestige as an Islamic cultural center from the late 7th century AD on. It was the capital of the Zand dynasty (1750-94).

Mohammed Shamsoddin Hafez
The greatest of Iran's lyric poets, Mohammed Shamsoddin Hafez, c.1325-c.1390, spent virtually all of his life in the city of Shiraz. Although orphaned early, he obtained a thorough education in the Islamic sciences--Hafez means one who has memorized the entire Koran. His lyrics, ghazals, are noted for their beauty and bring to fruition the erotic, mystical, and bacchic themes that had long pervaded Persian poetry. Widely acclaimed in his own day, he greatly influenced subsequent Persian poets and left his mark on such important Western writers as Goethe and Emerson.

Sheykh Moslehoddin Sadi
The prose and poetry of the Persian poet Sheykh Moslehoddin Sadi (c.1200-1292) are considered classics of Persian literature. Sadi studied in Baghdad and traveled in Anatolia and India before returning to his birthplace, Shiraz, where he spent the rest of his life. His earliest work, the Bustan (1257; trans. as The Orchard, 1882), is a didactic epic that contains ethical maxims and transcendental speculation. The Gulistan (1258; trans. as The Rose Garden, 1964), a collection of ethical and humorous anecdotes in elegant prose, interspersed with verse, is so accessible to Western literary taste that it has been repeatedly translated since 1787. Sadi was the first Persian poet to use the lyric to describe the trials of love, usually with accompanying moral lessons. Many of Sadi's lines have become commonly quoted proverbs.