Tomb of Saadi

Persian poet Saadi spent thirty years wandering through teahouses and remote corners of the medieval world, sitting with merchants, thieves, and Sufi mendicants after the Mongol invasions devastated his homeland. When he returned to Shiraz as an elderly man in the 13th century, he distilled those conversations into the Gulistan and Bustan, works so universally resonant that one of his poems now adorns the United Nations building in New York, reminding diplomats that humanity is one body where no limb can suffer alone.

Saadi and Hafez, Shiraz’s two most celebrated poets, never actually crossed paths. Hafez was born roughly a generation after Saadi died, close enough in time and geography that the city treats them as a matched pair, but Saadi had been in the ground for decades before Hafez wrote his first line. What they share is a hometown and a habit of being quoted by people who have never read either of them in full. Saadi got there first, and the United Nations, whether or not it advertises the fact, has been running one of his lines as a mission statement since 2005.