At a ceremony in Porto Cervo yesterday evening, local officials formally named the piazza, or town square, in honour of Mawlana Shah Karim. A commemorative sculpture was also unveiled to acknowledge his pioneering work to develop the surrounding area in Sardinia into a thriving coastal region.
Mawlana Hazar Imam was in attendance along with Prince Amyn and Princes Irfan and Sinan. In his remarks, which he delivered partly in Italian, Hazar Imam thanked local officials for the posthumous honour bestowed upon his father.
“A piazza is a place of meeting, memory, and community,” he said. “To associate my father’s name with this one places his memory within Porto Cervo — among the people, the architecture, the landscape and the sea he loved so deeply. My family and I are profoundly grateful for this moving tribute.”
When the late Imam first visited in the early 1960s, the region of Monti di Mola in Sardinia was a barren landscape with no roads or electricity. With his support and guidance, it was transformed into La Costa Smeralda — the Emerald Coast — using local materials while preserving its natural heritage.
The project, Hazar Imam explained, “allowed him to bring together many of the things he cared about deeply: architecture, craftsmanship, landscape, beauty and long-term development…”
