The Persian poet Nezami Ganjavi Day

Esfand 21 in the Iranian calendar year (March 12) celebrated by Iran as Nezami Day

Nezami (c. 1141-1209 CE), the greatest romantic epic poet in Persian literature, who lived during the 12th and early 13th centuries. He brought a colloquial and realistic style to the Persian epic. 

 

 As a narrative poet, he stands between Abolqasem Firdawsi (ca. 940–ca. 1020), the poet of Iran's heroic tradition and the author of Shahnamah (Book of Kings), and Jalaluddin Rumi (1207–1273), whose Divan-i kabir (Great Divan) and Kitab-i Masnavi Ma'navi (Spiritual Couplets) virtually define the forms of mystical lyric and mystical narrative poetry, respectively. Nezami’s narrative poetry is more comprehensive than that of either Firdawsi or Rumi, in that it includes the romantic dimensions of human relations as well the heroic, and plumbs the human psyche with an unprecedented depth and understanding. To be sure, a profound spiritual consciousness pervades his poetry, and to suggest otherwise would be to do him a disservice, but he does not, as does Rumi, make the whole focus of his work the evocation and articulation of the transcendent dimension of existence.

 

Nezami Ganjavi  is mostly known for “Khamseh”, two copies of which are preserved in Iran were inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register list in 2011.

“Khamseh” is a pentalogy of poems written in Masnavi verse form (rhymed couplets) with a total of 30,000 couplets. 

These five poems include the didactic work Makhzan ol-Asrar (The Treasury of Mysteries); the three traditional love stories of Khosrow and Shirin, Leili and Majnun, and Haft Paykar; and the Eskandar-nameh, which records the adventures of Alexander the Great.