Monument to Nizami Ganjavi

In the small park between houses 25 and 27 on Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt stands a bronze figure of the medieval poet Nizami Ganjavi — a gift from Azerbaijan to St Petersburg for the city's tercentenary. The monument recalls the centuries-old ties between the Persian-language poetry of the East and the culture of the Russian imperial capital.

Abu Muhammad Ilyas Yusuf, known as Nizami Ganjavi, was born around 1141 in the city of Ganja and is regarded as one of the greatest romantic poets of the medieval East, writing in Persian within the Azerbaijani literary tradition. The chief work of his life is the cycle of five philosophical poems known as the Khamsa, created between 1173 and 1203: The Treasury of Mysteries, Khosrow and Shirin, Layla and Majnun, The Seven Beauties, and Iskandar-nameh. These works, written in the rhyming couplet form known as masnavi, exerted an enormous influence on all subsequent Eastern literature and preserved valuable information about the musical culture of their era.

The five-metre bronze figure of the poet was cast in Baku from a model by the Azerbaijani sculptor Gorush Babayev, who had once graduated from Leningrad's Mukhina School, the Higher School of Art and Design. The author of the star-shaped pedestal was the honoured artist of Russia Felix Romanovsky, and the pedestal itself was made at a St Petersburg sculpture works. Nizami is depicted seated with a book in his hand, in traditional Eastern dress, beneath an arch; the inscription on the pedestal is in Azerbaijani.

The formal unveiling of the monument took place on 9 June 2002, a year before St Petersburg's tercentenary, with the participation of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Azerbaijani President Heydar Aliyev. The site of the park has its own urban history: even before the revolution, a large residential complex for the Rossiya insurance company had been planned here to a design by the architect Fyodor Lidval, but the First World War halted the project, and the plot remained an open space.

In 2011 the park was reconstructed and landscaped: granite benches inscribed with excerpts from Nizami's poems were installed, turning the space around the monument into a kind of literary corner for walking and reading.

Today the monument to Nizami Ganjavi remains a notable symbol of the cultural ties between St Petersburg and Azerbaijan, and one of the few monuments in the city dedicated to a classic of Eastern poetry, blending naturally into the fabric of the Petrograd Side.