TEHRAN -- The national poet of India Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was commemorated during a ceremony in Bandar Abbas in southern Iran.

The ceremony was organized by the Consulate of India in Bandar Abbas, the Embassy of India in Tehran reported in a press release on Friday.
Charge d’Affaires Sibi George addressed the audience and said that Gurudev Tagore is an icon of cultural relations between India and Iran.
Tagore is well known in Iran and is respected widely among the Iranian people, he added.
Director of Iran Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Mines in Hormozgan Province Mohammad-Amin Sabbaghzadeh also attended the ceremony.
Sabbaghzadeh praised Tagore’s contribution through his literary work to the international community. He said that his travelogue on his visit to Iran indicates how close he was to Iranian culture and Hafez.
Tagore, who also was a novelist, musician, painter and playwright, reshaped Indian literature and music. He is the first non-European who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.
Tagore visited Iran in 1932. He visited Shiraz, which is home to the tombs the Persian poets Hafez and Sadi. Tagore was said to have sat beside the tomb of Hafez for sometime in deep contemplation with eyes closed, and then to have read and recited some of Hafez’s poems in solitude.
“Sitting near the tomb a signal flashed through my mind, a signal from the bright and smiling eyes of the poet on a long past spring day. I had the distinct feeling that after a lapse of many centuries, across the span of many deaths and births, sitting near this tomb was another wayfarer who had made a bond with Hafez,” Tagore wrote in his travelogue on his visit to the tomb of Hafez.