Shiraz holds the graves of the two poets most Iranians can quote, and visiting them is not quite a literary activity. Hafez, who died in 1390, wrote lyrics saturated with wine, the beloved, the hypocrite preacher and the tavern of ruin, and Iranians have used the collected Divan as an oracle for centuries: the book is opened at random, at Nowruz or on the longest night of the year, and the poem found there is read as an answer. People do this at his tomb, where a reader will perform the opening for a small fee. Saadi, buried in the same city, wrote the Gulistan, a book of moral tales in prose and verse that was the standard schoolbook of the Persian speaking world.
Shiraz also has a serious philosophical genealogy. A succession of teachers there from the fifteenth century onward worked on the relation between revelation, demonstration and mystical insight, and the tradition culminated in Mulla Sadra, born in the city around 1571, who argued that existence rather than essence is fundamental, that being admits of degrees, and that substance itself is in motion, and whose synthesis has dominated Shia philosophical teaching ever since.
The city's principal Shia shrine is Shah Cheragh, over the grave of a brother of the eighth imam, with a mirrored interior of great brilliance. It is a busy pilgrimage site and was the target of an armed attack in 2022 in which worshippers were killed.