Bust of celebrated Persian poet Ferdowsi (935-1020) was unveiled in Nicosia on the National Ferdowsi Day (May 15).
The statue, a present from the Foreign Ministry in Tehran, has been placed in the open grounds of Cyprus Ministry of Foreign Affairs, IRNA reported on its Persian website.
Hadi Javaher-Asar, well-known sculptor from Neyriz city in Fars Province, created the bust of the eleventh-century poet from marble.
To honor the poet and commemorate the Farsi language, Iran’s ambassador to the country presented Turkish translations of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (Book of Kings) to universities in Cyprus.
The book is a product of three decades of work and considered as the world’s longest epic poem written by a single poet. It is of central importance in Persian culture and regarded as a literary masterpiece of the ethno-national cultural identity of modern-day Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan.
Over the past seven years Ferdowsi busts have been installed in Tajikistan, Bosnia, China and Finland.
One of the famous statues of the legendry poet is in Rome. It was created in 1958 by Abolhassan Seddiqi and restored in 2014. Seddiqi has made statues of the poet seen at Tehran’s Ferdowsi Square and the tomb of the celebrated poet in the city of in Khorasan Razavi Province.
