DP Theme Day: Sister Cities

Assalamualaikum. May Peace be with you on this wonderful Daily Photo Theme Day. Kuala Lumpur has 7 sister cities. One of them is the place of martyrdom, Mashhad, Iran.

**Mashhad is the second-largest city in Iran and one of the holiest cities in the Shi'a world. It sits about 900km east of Tehran and has long been the center of secular as well as religious learning. The large Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, named after the great Iranian poet, is located here.

Ferdowsi (935-1020) is a highly revered Persian poet. He was the author of the Shāhnāmeh, the national epic of Persian-speaking world as well as the entire Iranian realm. The Shāhnāmeh, or the "Book of Kings," consists of the translation of an even older Pahlavi (Middle Persian) work. It has remained exceptionally popular among Persians for over a thousand years. It tells the history of old Persia before the Arab conquest of the region. This tale, all written in poetic form and in Darī Persian, starts 7,000 years ago, narrating the story of Persian kings, Persian knights, Persian system of laws, Persian Religion, Persian victories and Persian tragedies.

Ferdowsi is one of the undisputed giants of Persian literature. After Ferdowsi's Shāhnāmeh a number of other works similar in nature surfaced over the centuries within the cultural sphere of the Persian language. Without exception, all such works were based in style and method on Ferdowsi's Shāhnāmeh, but none of them could quite achieve the same degree of fame and popularity as Ferdowsi's masterpiece.

Ferdowsi has a unique place in Persian history because of the strides he made in reviving and regenerating the Persian language and cultural traditions. His works are cited as a crucial component in the persistence of the Persian language, as those works allowed much of the tongue to remain codified and intact. In this respect, Ferdowsi surpasses Nezami, Khayyam, Asadi Tusi, and other seminal Persian literary figures in his impact on Persian culture and language. Many modern Iranians see him as the father of the modern Persian language.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica:The Persians regard Ferdowsi as the greatest of their poets. For nearly a thousand years they have continued to read and to listen to recitations from his masterwork, the Shah-nameh, in which the Persian national epic found its final and enduring form. Though written about 1,000 years ago, this work is as intelligible to the average, modern Iranian as the King James version of the Bible is to a modern English-speaker. The language, based as the poem is on a Pahlavi original, is pure Persian with only the slightest admixture of Arabic.**

The picture above: the Tomb of Ferdowsi. Ferdowsi was buried at the yard of his own home, where his mausoleum now lies. It was not until Reza Shah Pahlavi's rule, in 1925, that a mausoleum was built for the great poet.

Click here to view thumbnails for all 148 participants. That's a lot of sister cities participating in this month's theme. Let's travel the World.

* Meead, thank you so much for this picture. I wish you peace. I'm very happy we made this swap.
** text extracted from wikipedia