Shiraz on the Adriatic: Persian Literary Culture, Φαρσί speakers and Multilingual Locals between Cairo, the Balkans and Venice

This paper aims at opening a discussion on the place(s) of Persian in early modern Eastern Mediterranean, in the “significant geography” perspective brilliantly put forward by Francesca Orsini; I will touch here three intertwined, non-coeval cases of trans-linguistic “localisation” of a cosmopolitan literary practice. While mostly focusing on the Adriatic and the Balkans, these investigations of mine start on the Nile, with a few glimpses from Naguib Mahfouz’s (1911-2006) Cairo. As the intertwined case-studies touched upon in this survey clearly show, only a project of deep philological excavations in local microhistories will be to properly unheart the early modern ecology of Persian between the Adriatic and the Nile: from Mahfouz’s elusive Cairote sufis to the Albanian mediators of the Serenissima, from Balkanic linguistic common places to Darvish Pasha’s waqf in Mostar, several untold Mediterranean stories still await for their place in our perception of the so-called “Persianate world” and the true nature(s) of its very localized cosmopolis.