The Poet of Journeys

Among the most beloved of Persian poets is Jalal al-Din Rumi, who might almost be called a son of the Silk Road. He was born in a small town near Balkh, in what is now Afghanistan, in 1207. When Mongol tribes threatened the region, his jurist father took the family to Samarkand and then to Damascus, where the young Rumi studied with eminent Arab scholars. Eventually the family settled in what is now central Anatolia in Turkey but was then the small kingdom of Laranda, part of the Seljuk empire. They lived in its capital, Konya.