Tomb of Hafez

Hafez, the fourteenth-century lyric poet of Shiraz, died around 1390 and was buried in a garden on the edge of his city. The garden is known as the Hafezieh, simply “the place of Hafez”. A memorial was raised over the grave under Karim Khan Zand in the eighteenth century, and the present pavilion was built in 1935 to a design by the French architect and archaeologist André Godard.

The tomb itself is a slab of pale alabaster carved with lines from Hafez's poetry. Above it rises an open pavilion of eight slender stone columns carrying a copper-covered dome shaped, people say, like a dervish's hat. Look up and the underside of the dome is a mosaic of tile in turquoise, blue and red, arranged in interlacing stars. The pavilion is set among orange trees, rose beds and long rectangular pools.

What makes the Hafezieh unlike most literary shrines is how it is used. Shirazis come here in the evening to sit, talk and recite. Many practise the fal-e Hafez, the custom of opening his collected poems, the Divan, at random and reading the ghazal that falls open as an answer to a private question. Street vendors outside offer the same service with a printed verse and, sometimes, a trained bird to pick the card.