It is hard to imagine another modern culture more in thrall to its distant literary past than Iranians with their Shahnama, the national epic composed by the poet Ferdowsi in the eleventh century. With its luminous array of villains, heroes, and demons, and stories probing the struggle of love against betrayal and good against evil, the Book of Kings is at once a retelling of Persian history before the Arabic conquest and a repository of literary myths that places Ferdowsi alongside Shakespeare and Homer as one of the great giants of storytelling. The Shahnama exerts a profound emotional and psychological hold over Iranians to this day, and the epic remains central to contemporary Iranian identity, a perennial cultural refuge in turbulent political times.

“Being originally from Russia, working on this project with the British, I realise we are sort of the worst possible candidates from the Iranian point of view to organise the preservation of Persian culture.” Dr Firuza Abdullaeva gives a self-deprecating smile to a chorus of knowing chuckles. As Head of Pembroke College’s Shahnameh Centre for Persian Studies, inaugurated this Saturday, Dr Abdullaeva has every reason to smile.  The Shahnameh Centre is the culmination of a project founded by Professor Charles Melville in 1999, and despite the superfluous ghosts of old wrongs, any misgivings could be formed only in error. In their passion, neither Melville nor Abdullaeva could be doubted (the latter named at least three paintings from the ‘Time Forward’ exhibition as her favourites, and may well have elucidated more had she had time). Both are giants in their field, and continue the impressive tradition of research into Persian culture which has existed in Pembroke since at least the 1880s, and which has included such eminent...

Charles Melville is Professor of Persian History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Pembroke College. He has a BA (Hons.) in Arabic and Persian from Cambridge (1972), an MA in Islamic History (SOAS, 1973) and a PhD on the Historical seismicity of Iran (Cambridge, 1978). His main research interests are in the history and historiography of Iran in the Mongol to Safavid periods (14th-17th centuries), and the illustration of Persian manuscripts. Recent publications include “The illustration of history in Safavid manuscript painting”, in Colin P. Mitchell (ed.) New Perspectives on Safavid Iran: Empire and Society, London 2011; “The itineraries of Shahrukh b. Timur (1405-47)”, in D. Durand-Guédy (ed.) Turko-Mongol Rulers, Cities and City Life, Leiden, 2013, and “The Royal image in Mongol Iran”, in Lynette Mitchell & Charles Melville (eds), Every Inch a King: Comparative studies on kings and kingship in the ancient and medieval worlds, Leiden, 2013. He is currently working on the illustration of mediaeval Persian history.

Opening of the solo exhibition of Sergey Feofanov ‘The Flight of Simurgh’. The opening ceremony included many speeches, among them by the newly appointed ambassador of Iran to Russia, HE Mehdi Sanai; a Member of the Russian Academy of Fine Arts, Vladimir Molchanov; a Member of the Board of the Russian Academy of Fine Arts and President of the Artists of Moscow, Boris Messerer; and the Head of the Cambridge Shahnama Centre Dr Firuza Melville.