TEHRAN–The tourism authorities of the Iranian capital plan to organize arrays of literary tours, IRNA reported on Sunday.

The participants will explore house museums of the literary luminaries of the city through the tours, which will be held on Monday and Tuesday, an official with Tehran Municipality said.

The tours will include visits to the historical houses of poets Nima Yushij, Mehdi Akhavan-Saless, Forugh Farrokhzad and literary couple Jalal Al-e-Ahmad and Simin Daneshvar, Mohammad Moayyedi explained.

The participants will also be given detailed explanations of the celebrities, their careers, and their lives, he noted.

The streets and neighborhoods of Tehran are a treasure trove of the city’s identity, he mentioned.

Some of the historical mansions across the city have been home to famous cultural figures and have shaped the literary history of the country, he added.

Last year, Tehran Municipality announced that a “cultural passage” was to be set up to connect the house of the late poet Nima Yushij to the one that once was the home of literary couple Jalal Al-e-Ahmad and Simin Daneshvar.

Earlier that month, the fully renovated house of Yushij, who is famed as the father of modern Persian poetry, was officially unveiled by the municipality’s Beautification Organization.

In 2019, Tehran Municipality purchased the house, which is situated in northern Tehran near the house of the famed Iranian couple Al-e-Ahmad and Daneshvar, who were novelists and short-story writers.

Yushij came to the scene of change at a time when all the conservative efforts of the Neo-classicists, Revivalists, and others had failed to free Persian poetry from the long decadence which was, to a great extent, the result of the ruling power of prosody over the subject matter.

Al-e Ahmad translated works by French writers André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus into Persian. In 2008, Iran established the Jalal Al-e Ahmad Literary Awards in memory of the writer, who passed away in 1969.

Mehdi Akhavan-Saless wrote over twenty books, including “Arghanun” and “Winter.” He was well acquainted with Persian classical poetry. However, he focused on free-verse poetry.

Akhavan-Saless taught Persian literature at the University of Tehran and several other academic centers and was sentenced to several years in prison and exile for his political activities during the reign of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The poet was buried in Tus beside the tomb of Ferdowsi, the poet who wrote the Persian epic masterpiece, the Shahnameh.

The influential Iranian poet and film director Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-1967) is considered one of the Iranian modernists and most famous female poets.

Her first book of poetry, “The Captive”, was published in 1955. “The Wall”, “The Rebellion” and “Another Birth” are her other works. Farrokhzad died in a car accident when she was 32.

Literary tourism is a type of cultural tourism and occurs when authors or their literature become so popular that people are drawn to either those locations associated with the author such as their birthplace, home, graveside, or those featured within their writings.

ABU/AM