"Travelers and Travelogues in Safavid Iran"

he Soudavar Memorial Foundation is the main sponsor of the conference “Travelers and Travelogues in Safavid Iran”, National Library of Portugal, Lisbon 28-29 March 2018

This is the fourth and arguable the most interesting of a series of conference held in the Iberian Peninsula on the complexities of Hispano-Safavid relations which were a major contributor to European knowledge about Iran. The previous converences were held at Madrid and Alicante .

The importance of the conference is highlighted on the website of the conference in the following terms:

“The beginning of the Safavid dynasty coincided with a renewed European interest in Iran, and thanks to an increasing number of printed narratives describing the voyages of western travelers both the country and its rulers became household names in Europe for the following two and a half centuries. Though Iran had been the object of earlier European writings since the Middle Ages, the discovery of the printing press made these travelogues available to a larger audience, thus disseminating more information on the country, its history, people, religion and habits than ever before.”

“However, not all travel writings are travelogues, and not all travelogues were published. As the travelogue became a literary genre in Renaissance and Baroque Europe, Iran came to be one of the countries traditionally depicted in these writings. This profusion of narratives, either manuscript or printed, testifies to the interest aroused by Safavid Iran among its contemporaries, and also bear witness to the fascination felt by travelers from different cultural backgrounds during their Iranian sojourn.”

For more information see: https://costaesousaluis.wixsite.com/travelersafavid