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Khagani (خاقانی) Shirvani

Khaqani or Khaghani was a Persian and Azerbaijan poet. He was born in Shirvan and died in Tabriz.

Khaghani (real name, Afzaladdin Ibrahim ibn Ali Nadjar), a great Persian poet and a master of panegyric qasida was born in the family of a carpenter in Melgem, a village near Shamakhy. Khaghani lost his father at an early age and was brought up by his uncle Qafi-eddin, a doctor and astronomer at the Shirvanshah’s court, who for seven years (till his death) acted "both as nurse and tutor" to Khaghani. Khaghani's mother was a Christian of Georgian origin.

In his youth, Khaghani wrote under the pen-name Haqiqi. After he had been invited to the court of the Khaghan Shirvanshah he assumed the pen-name of Khaghani ("regal"). The life of a court poet palled on him, and he "fled from the iron cage where he felt like a bird with a broken wing" and set off a journey about the Middle East. His travels gave him material for his famous poem Tohfat-ul Iraqein ( A Gift from the Two Iraqs), the two Iraqs being 'Persian Iraq' (western Iran) and 'Arabic Iraq' (Mesopotamia). This book supplies us with a good deal of material for his biography and in which he described his impressions of the Middle East. He also wrote his famous qasida The Arch of Madain beautifully painting his sorrow and impression of the remains of Sassanid's Palace near the Ctesiphon.

On return home, Khaghani broke off with the court of the Shirvanshah’s, and Shah Akhsitan gave order for his imprisonment. It was in prison that Khaghani wrote one of his most powerful anti-feudal poems called Habsiyye (Prison Poem). Upon release he moved with his family to Tabriz where fate dealt with him one tragic blow after another: first his young son died, then his daughter and then his wife. Khagani was left all alone, and he soon too died in Tabriz. He was buried at the Poet’s Cemetery in Surkhab Neighbourhood of Tabriz.

Khaghani left a remarkable Persian-language heritage which includes some magnificent odes-distiches of as many as three hundred lines with the same rhyme, melodious ghazals, dramatic poems protesting against oppression and glorifying reason and toil, and elegies lamenting the death of his children, his wife and his relatives.

USSR, 1980, Khagani Shirvani