خرابات

The kharâbât is one of the reasons Hafez was sometimes accused of heresy by literal-minded contemporaries and is sometimes still flattened into a drinking-poet by readers who miss the symbolic frame. Iranian readers learn to hold the literal and the metaphorical at once, and most educated Iranians would say that kharâbât in classical poetry almost always means the inner condition, not the actual tavern. The word survives in modern Persian only as a literary term: nobody uses خرابات in everyday speech to mean a real tavern. The image lives entirely inside the poetic register.