Khosrow and Shirin, the king, the princess and the sculptor Farhad

Among the great love poems of Persian literature, Khosrow and Shirin has a particular feature: its male protagonist is a king who really lived. The story joins the memory of the last great ruler of the Sasanian dynasty to a determined princess and an unforgettable rival, the craftsman Farhad, and over the centuries it has produced a large family of retellings.

A king from history

Khosrow II, called Parviz, the victorious, ruled Sasanian Persia from 590 to 628, with a brief interruption at the beginning. He fought for a long time against the Byzantine Empire and even conquered Jerusalem and Egypt, before being defeated by the emperor Heraclius. In 628 he was deposed and killed on the orders of his son Kavad II, also called Shiruyeh.

Syriac and Byzantine sources mention among his wives a Christian woman named Shirin, very influential at court. Around this historical core grew a legend already known to Ferdowsi, who in his Book of Kings, completed around 1010, tells a version of it. But it was another poet who made it a masterpiece.

Nizami's poem

Around 1180 Nizami of Ganja, the same author as Layla and Majnun, composed the poem Khosrow and Shirin. In his version Shirin is an Armenian princess, niece of a queen. The painter Shapur, a friend of Khosrow, shows her a portrait of the prince and she falls in love with him. In one of the most famous scenes Khosrow comes upon her bathing in a spring, without knowing who she is.

Their love passes through many obstacles. Khosrow loses and regains the throne, marries other women for political reasons, among them, according to tradition, a daughter of the Byzantine emperor, and often behaves frivolously. Shirin, on the other hand, refuses to give herself to him without a lawful marriage and demands that the king prove himself worthy of her love.

Farhad and the mountain

Meanwhile Farhad, a highly skilled sculptor and engineer, also falls in love with Shirin. For her he accepts an impossible task: to cut a passage through the rock of Mount Bisotun so as to bring the milk of the flocks to the princess's palace. Khosrow, jealous, has false news of Shirin's death brought to him, and Farhad throws himself from the mountain.

Mount Bisotun really exists, in western Iran, and preserves reliefs and inscriptions from the time of Darius I, far older than the Sasanians. Popular tradition, however, attributed to Farhad many of the carvings in the region, including those at nearby Taq-e Bostan, where a Sasanian king on horseback appears. Readers saw in it the contrast between the toil of the poor lover and the power of the king.

Faithful to the grave

In the end Khosrow and Shirin marry, and the king, under his wife's influence, becomes a more just ruler. But his son Shiruyeh has him killed and wants Shirin for himself. She pretends to agree, asks to visit her husband's tomb and there kills herself beside him. The story later inspired Amir Khusraw of Delhi and, in 1484, the poet Alisher Navoi.

In many later retellings Farhad became the true hero, a symbol of pure love and patient labour, while Khosrow stood for power. Nizami's poem holds both figures together around Shirin, one of the strongest and most self-aware heroines of medieval literature. Shirin, in fact, is not merely loved: it is she who guides the story, sets conditions and decides her own fate, down to her final gesture.