The millennial anniversary of the creation of 'Shahnameh', an epic masterpiece by renowned Persian poet Abolqasem Ferdowsi was held in Vienna on Thursday, IRNA reported.
Over 200 cultural Iranian and foreign elites took part in the ceremony.
Organized by Iran's Cultural Center Vienna, Austria, recitation of the epic poetry including 'Naqqali' were performed.
Naqqali is a style of dramatized narration of epic stories from 'Shahnameh'. It is performed by a naqqal (narrator) or a morshed (mentor), alongside paintings depicting scenes from 'Shahnameh'.
The year of 2010 was named the Shahnameh Millennium in UNESCO's 181st Summit. Numerous cultural events have been held worldwide to mark the occasion.
'Shahnameh' has a lofty status in Persian literature, as it played a crucial role in saving the Persian language from extinction. Ferdowsi worked for 30 years to finish this masterpiece.
The Shahnameh was written around 1000 AD and is the national epic of the cultural sphere of Greater Persia. Consisting of some 60,000 verses, the Shahnameh tells the mythical and historical past of (Greater) Iran from the creation of the world until the Islamic conquest of Persia in the 7th century.
The work is of central importance in Persian culture, regarded as a literary masterpiece, and definitive of ethno-national cultural identity of Iran.
Ferdowsi started his composition of the Shahnameh in the Samanid era in 977 A.D and completed it on 8 March 1010 during the Ghaznavid era.
The Shahnameh is a monument of poetry and historiography, being mainly the poetical recast of what Ferdowsi, his contemporaries, and his predecessors regarded as the account of Iran's ancient history.
Shahnameh, has over 50,000 couplets, written in early Modern Persian. The poetry is based mainly on a prose work of the same name compiled in Ferdowsi's earlier life in his native Tus.