The poet of Shiraz
Shams al-Din Muhammad Hafez spent nearly his whole life in Shiraz, and his ghazals, love poems that are also mystical, are the most loved verses in the Persian language. Families keep his Divan beside the Quran and the Shahnameh, and on Yalda night and at Nowruz they open it at random for a fal, a reading that answers whatever is on the reader’s heart.
Six centuries of memorials
A small domed memorial was first built over the grave around 1452. In 1773 Karim Khan Zand, who made Shiraz his capital, added a hall with four columns and laid a marble slab engraved with the poet’s verses over the tomb. The pavilion seen today was designed by the French architect and archaeologist André Godard and completed in 1940: eight slender columns, about ten metres tall, carry a copper dome shaped like a dervish’s hat, its underside glowing with tile mosaic.
Around it are orange trees, long pools and a tea house. In the evening the dome is lit, and the garden fills with people reciting poems to each other.
