Iranian Poetry Sounds at Astrakhan State University

The ASU Faculty of Foreign Languages welcomed Iranian diplomats, accredited to Astrakhan, as the audience and members of the jury for the competition of Persian poetry declamation.

The event was organized by students and teachers of the Department of Asian Languages and is dedicated to the 40th anniversary the 1979 Iranian Revolution, a public holiday in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

ASU teachers and students congratulated the audience on the occasion and wished them all the best. Aleksandr Mukhin, an associate professor of the Department of Asian Languages who had lived and worked in Iran for several years before the revolution and visited the country several times after it, shared his impressions from the dramatic changes, occurred those times. The students, who have just come back from Iran after a 2.5-month Farsi course at the University of Guilan, thanked the administration of the Iranian Consulate for their support and assistance in the exchange programme implementation.

Three groups of students declaimed poems of famous Iranian poets at the competition. The foreign guests commended the students’ pronunciation, tonality, intonation and rhythm of Iranian poems. Then the jury chose a winner in each group.

After the competition results, Ali Mohammadi, the Consul-General of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Astrakhan, addressed the audience with a speech about the national holiday of his country, congratulated the winners, gave them prizes and thanked the students and teachers for organizing and holding the competition. At the end of the meeting, Mokhtari Behrouz, the Deputy Consul-General of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Astrakhan who is a native of Shiraz, read some poems of Saadi, his famous compatriot, and told the participants about his own experience of learning the Russian poetry.