Aficionados of literature have commemorated the Day of Sa’adi of Shiraz, the world-renowned Persian poet and literary scholar of the medieval period.

A number of Persian literature enthusiasts gathered at Sa’adi’s mausoleum in the southern Iranian city of Shiraz on Sunday.

Sa’adi, along with Rumi and Hafez, is regarded as one of the three main pillars of ghazal (love poem) in Persian poetry.

Born in the Iranian city of Shiraz in 1208, Sa’adi is often referred to as the Master of Prose and Poetry in the Persian literature and he has been globally praised for expressing his deep social and moral thoughts in a style which is famous for being “simple but impossible to imitate.”

Sa’adi studied Islamic sciences, law, governance, history, Arabic literature and Islamic theology at the Nizamiyya University in Baghdad and set off for a three-decade journey to foreign lands after the Mongols invaded Iran in the 1220s.

Sa’adi is best-known for his books Bustan (The Orchard) and Golestan (The Rose Garden) as well as a number of masterly odes portraying human experiences.

In the two books, Sa’adi tells many colorful anecdotes of his travels through Anatolia and the Levant where he was captured by Crusaders at Acre and spent seven years as a slave digging trenches outside its fortress.

Apart from Bustan and Golestan, Sa’adi also composed a book of love poems (ghazals), as well as a number of odes, quatrains and short pieces in both Persian and Arabic.