Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh (1892-1997) is considered the pioneer of modern Persian story writing by the majority of literary critics inside and outside Iran. His prominent status is attributed to his emulating European forms of the short story and novel, and transferring their form into an Iranian context. Hassan Abedini calls Jamalzadeh the first Iranian author who combined methods of European story writing and Persian narration techniques, and produced modern Persian short stories (“Call for Return to the Past” 151). Homayoun Katouzian maintains that because Jamalzadeh lived in Europe most of his life, he was able to compare the Western modern institutions and thoughts with Iranian traditional culture and worldview, and consequently represent his critical and progressive views in the form and content of his stories. (“On Jamalzadeh and Studying Jamalzadeh” 186). And in view of Ebrahim Estaji, Jamalzadeh was the first Iranian writer who followed Western models of short story writing and poured Iranian prose into the mold of Western narration (“Jamalzadeh’s Place in Persian Story Writing” 307). Therefore, Jamalzadeh’s familiarity with Western culture and literature, his use of modern European narrative genres to represent contemporary sociopolitical issues, as well as his mastery of classical Persian poetic prose constitute the principal components of his modern literary artistry. Nonetheless, his works do not necessarily comprise a rupture with classical Persian narratives, but illustrate a continuation of them. Drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s insights on “the literary chronotope,” the current study aims to demonstrate how Jamalzadeh’s rendition of the “chronotope of travel/ excursion/ journey” is connected to the narratives in Sa’di’s Gulistan (1258). In Bakhtin’s view, a chronotope refers to “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (84). He argues that the chronotope in literature has “an intrinsic generic significance,” thus defines “genre and generic distinctions”; moreover, the chronotope determines the “image of man in literature” as the image of man is “always intrinsically chronotopic” (85). This paper analyses Sa’di’s Golestan (1258) and Jamalzadeh’s most famous collection of short stories Once Upon a Time (1921) chronotopically in order to chart the generic affinities and disjunctures between the two. By comparing the chronotope of travel in these works, it aims to depict not only their literary styles but also the dominant conception of man in their respective eras.