Mausoleum of Rudaki

The mausoleum of Rudaki stands in Panjrud, a village in the Zarafshan valley about sixty kilometres east of Panjakent in north-western Tajikistan. Abu Abdallah Rudaki was born here in the second half of the ninth century and became court poet to the Samanid emir Nasr II in Bukhara. He is remembered as the first great poet of New Persian, and Persian speakers from Tajikistan to Iran and Afghanistan call him the father of Persian poetry. In Tajikistan he is honoured as a founder of the nation's literature.

Only a small part of his work survives, but some of it is still recited by heart. His best-known poem, beginning Bu-ye Ju-ye Muliyan, “the scent of the Muliyan stream”, is said to have been sung to persuade the emir to leave his summer camp and return home to Bukhara; tradition says the emir rode off at once, without even pulling on his boots. Medieval sources describe Rudaki as blind, though whether he was blind from birth or lost his sight later has long been debated.

In his old age Rudaki returned to Panjrud, where he died around 941. A grave long venerated in the village as the poet's was championed as his by the Tajik writer Sadriddin Ayni, and in 1956 the Soviet anthropologist Mikhail Gerasimov opened it and made a reconstruction of the poet's face from the skull. The mausoleum over the grave was built in 1958 for the 1,100th anniversary of his birth and has since been rebuilt and enlarged, set in a garden above the village, with views of the mountains along the Zarafshan.