Balkh or Bust

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00:01
George Gavrilis
This episode was recorded some weeks before the Taliban entered Kabul. A bit down the road, we will talk about the current situation of Afghanistan's museums and heritage sites. We know that many of you are wondering. For now, this episode provides essential context.

00:22
Laura Tedesco
And it cycles back to the question you asked me some time ago— how can one hold space to both care about culture, and all of these other very grave life-and-death things that are happening on the ground right now in Afghanistan? And sometimes I find it very easy to hold space for all of it and to acknowledge what a very dire situation Afghans are having right now. And I can hold that in my mind at the same time as caring deeply about the preservation of culture. But today, I'm not holding the space very well. It's really rather heavy.

01:04
George Gavrilis

Yeah, the history of humanity is heavy.

01:11
George Gavrilis
Afghanistan is a big country. A touch bigger than France, and way bigger than California. We are going to head north to a part of the country we’ve not yet talked about: the legendary north. It’s a part of Afghanistan with provinces that have dreamy names: Badakhshan, Balkh, Kunduz, Jowzjan, Takhar. It’s stunningly diverse— Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmen, Hazara, Pashtuns, and Kyrgyz nomads mix.

01:39
George Gavrilis
The north conjures images of self-reliance and autonomy. It was a military and trading hub where warlords wielded great power. And until recently it formed the backbone of resistance to the Taliban. Today, the north is poor and in trouble. Nearly 30% of its population is internally displaced having fled years of violence, instability, and most recently, the Taliban onslaught.

02:05
George Gavrilis
Yet, the north is rich in one enduring way, in its archaeology and its cultural heritage. Its wealth includes pre-historic tombs, massive city walls dating from the third century BC, the earliest mosque in Central Asia, intricate carpet weaving industries, and plenty of oral traditions handed down across generations about the imprint Alexander the Great and Rumi left in the area.

02:32
George Gavrilis
Laurie and I ask ourselves: How do you preserve fragile archaeological sites in a place where exfoliating winds blow? And how can the work continue now that the Taliban rule the region while their soldiers take selfies in front of heritage sites?

02:53
George Gavrilis
This is Monuments Woman with Laura Tedesco. I'm your host George Gavrilis. If you are new to this podcast, we recommend going back to start with Episode 1. For everyone else, welcome back. Let's jump in.

03:17
Laura Tedesco
"May 15, 2011. Finally, in Mazar-i-Sharif, after months and months of anticipation, invitations, planning. Arrived via Embassy Air with colleagues, and the French archaeologists, their expertise welcome. The heat is too much for midday work. Visited old Balkh City, and Kwaja Parsa, Noh Gumbad, and the Bala Hissar. And the Blue Mosque— stunning. Ended with an ice cream cone from a street vendor."

04:01
George Gavrilis
Hey, you've spent some time in the north of Afghanistan. I mean, international news about Afghan cultural heritage is pretty scarce to begin with. But it's particularly scarce when it comes to the north, which is actually really rich in archaeological heritage. So where do we start?

04:15
Laura Tedesco
Oh, wow. Yes. The north of Afghanistan is so fascinating for its heritage. We might as well start where I happen to make my first visit.

04:27
George Gavrilis
Where was that?

04:29
Laura Tedesco
—to a major capital city in the north called Mazar-i-Sharif. A very bustling economic city near the border with Uzbekistan— very important contemporary history, archaeological history— and that whole district of northern Afghanistan. Alexander the Great passed through there. Early Islam was established in Central Asia there. We could go on and on. It's an archaeologist's paradise. 

04:58
George Gavrilis
Tell me about that first visit.

05:00
Laura Tedesco
I flew up with a small group of colleagues. And at that time, there was an American consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif. So there was already a population of American diplomats established there who could receive this group from Kabul. I remember that the time of year was so hot that we had to start in the morning at 4:30 in order to get the work done and be finished by 9 am because after that, it was untenably hot, you couldn't really even be out.

05:35
Laura Tedesco
I was there to review, visit, and evaluate as many heritage sites as I could fit in the span of two or three days. I remember I was accompanied by the French archaeologists, who we've talked about before, who had been historically quite active in conducting archaeology in northern Afghanistan. They were quite keen to host our tour and really highlight how productive the French had already been in northern Afghanistan.

06:09
Laura Tedesco
And they knew that the purpose of the visit was for the United States to decide where and how much money to direct to heritage preservation in northern Afghanistan. It was kind of the cook's tour of the most prominent heritage sites in Balkh Province, and the capital of Balkh province is Mazar-i-Sharif. But the real centerpiece of Balkh from a historic standpoint is the city of Balkh, which is a historic city, and its nickname is "the mother of all cities"— I kind of like that name. And it has an enormous citadel, or fortress, around it and the foundations were built by Alexander the Great— they may even predate him.

07:02
Laura Tedesco
The earliest Islamic site in all of Afghanistan, probably the earliest Islamic site in all of Central Asia— but for the moment, we'll say for Afghanistan, is in Balkh. It's called Noh Gumbad, and it's a partially collapsed structure that's about the size of a three-car garage for big SUVs, not little cars. It is a building that would have originally had nine domes for its roof, hence the name, Noh Gumbad, which means nine domes. All those domes have collapsed. What's left standing now are some exterior walls, some interior columns, and two arches, which would have supported the original roof.

07:57
Laura Tedesco
And it's this exquisite old building, genuinely a ruin, although a very well-tended ruin. That was over 10 years ago, and in the intervening time from my first visit to when we're talking now, George, extensive, extensive restoration work has taken place at Noh Gumbad and continues until recently with the shifting Taliban control of that area of Afghanistan. The work can't take place now.

08:30
George Gavrilis
Walk us through the mosque. What does it look like?

08:32
Laura Tedesco
You approach from a very small two-lane road, and you wouldn't see it unless you knew what to look for. And what you might notice first is a big metal corrugated roof that's over the ruin of Noh Gumbad, which has sort of open sides with metal bars holding it up.

08:51
Laura Tedesco
I've never been able to confirm exactly when that roof was installed. I've heard the '80s. I've heard the '90s. I don't really know. If you're driving in or walking in, you would enter a kind of extended walled compound. This walled compound has a partial mud brick cement wall, enclosing an area that's about the size of maybe two soccer fields, maybe a little bit bigger. There's a little dirt path and you approach and then you see what's under this corrugated metal roof.

09:22
Laura Tedesco
And it is the remains of an late eighth, early ninth century Islamic building. That may seem not interesting, but in the context of the arrival of Islam in Central Asia, it's very significant.

09:40
George Gavrilis
Right, I think the mosque was the first one that was constructed in Afghanistan—

09:45
Laura Tedesco
Yes.

09:46
George Gavrilis
And certainly is constructed very soon after Islam arrived in Central Asia in general.

09:51
Laura Tedesco
Oh, within minutes. Islam arrived, and by Sunday, that mosque was constructed. I'm exaggerating, but very early.

09:58
George Gavrilis
You talked about the collapsed domes, so that none of the nine domes are left, and the corrugated roof would have been constructed in recent memory. So what would have prevented the mosque from sustaining even further damage?

10:14
Laura Tedesco
I think just general care and upkeep over the centuries. Most of the damage is just from natural causes. Very strong prevailing winds that come whipping through in certain seasons, and just the exposure to weather over time, degraded the site.

10:38
Laura Tedesco
There is immediately adjacent to one of the exterior walls of the mosque, the burial of a revered saint named Piyada. The site is called Haji Piyada, which sometimes Noh Gumbad is referred to as that. I don't know exactly when this mausoleum was built next to Noh Gumbad. I mention it because it's very much on the spiritual landscape of the local population. People are going all the time to visit this holy shrine to offer a prayer or to meet up with friends or have a picnic.

11:14
George Gavrilis
Especially women, right? The Haji is very important to women.

11:19
Laura Tedesco
Yes, evidently, particular prayers unique to women, can be answered by this saint. Yeah. I've been told some of the prayers are often for to have a child, to not have a child, to cure a toothache in a child, to cure a toothache in a mother. It's not to make the prayers as if they're insignificant, but like a whole host of prayers can be answered. And there's flags and pieces of fabric tied to the shrine. That's fairly common, you know, where you leave a memento of your visit.

11:53
George Gavrilis
Those prayers would be expected in an area of extreme poverty, where you don't have access to great healthcare. And you do what you can to hope for and to work for and to pray for better times, especially for your children.

12:05
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, sure, poverty is a component in that and maybe even a larger ethos, George, of a sense that our health is more in the hands of, say the spiritual realm than it would be in the hands of the medical professionals— sort of ordained by Allah and his saints and less ordained by whether you get the right antibiotic or not.

12:37
George Gavrilis
In any event, you were talking about what it's like to approach the mosque and then to walk around inside its ruins. What does it look like? What's left?

12:47
Laura Tedesco
At the time that I visited, if you could imagine, you're not walking on the original floor of the mosque. You would, now, if you visited in 2021, but at that time, there was three to four feet of what's called overburden, which is the collapsed roof and all the dust and dirt and maybe the garbage that's blown in and eventually been covered up. So you're walking three or four feet above the original floor level. So sort of in the midst of the standing architecture, and it gives it this very human scale. It's lacking a kind of grandeur to it.

13:24
Laura Tedesco
As you look closely at the architecture that's remaining, there's just this exquisite molded plaster of flowers and vines. And if you look closely in some places, you can see the remnants of very bright paint. Most of that's all gone, so you have to know where to look to see the remnants of the blue or the red paint that would have decorated this space.

13:50
George Gavrilis
But you know, the Buddhist statues that you talked about at Mes Aynak would also have been painted really bright colors. Were there Buddhist influences on the architecture of the mosque as well?

13:59
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, there were, and it's not something that's really talked about prominently. But the site of Noh Gumbad was likely built atop a Buddhist stupa to supplant the earlier dominant religion. Now Islam was there. And that's a fairly common thing, you know, where once a kind of sacred space, always a sacred space, you can just replace how it's sacred— the way churches in Sicily are built on top of Greek temples, for example.

14:31
Laura Tedesco
Right now, at this moment, the site is really under threat. Just as of last week, I received photos from Afghanistan of Taliban fighters standing inside Noh Gumbad. They don't look particularly threatening. And you might think, Oh, it's a group of young men who are tourists and they have their plastic sandals on and they're just strolling through for selfies. But they're holding rocket launchers, which gives a menacing appearance to their attendance at Noh Gumbad.

15:04
Laura Tedesco
And the word that I'm receiving now is that they've been told it's an early Islamic site, and that there's no need for them to behave threateningly towards it. What that means is the Afghan government no longer has control of that particular location to protect it. That's very concerning, because what we have is the earliest Islamic structure, as I said, in Afghanistan, probably in all of Central Asia.

15:31
Laura Tedesco
And while it may not be targeted specifically, because it's a historic location, it could be used as a defensive location. A small platoon of Taliban may decide to camp out there because it's covered, because it's a walled compound—

15:48
George Gavrilis
Or light a fire to cook some food inside.

15:51
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, exactly, exactly.

15:54
George Gavrilis
Yeah, it happens.

15:55
Laura Tedesco
So it's a concern. It's an immediate concern I have, and I'm not alone in that.

16:02
George Gavrilis
What do you mean, you're not alone? What's happening behind the scenes? At least, right now, when we're talking about this, it hasn't fully hit the media cycle.

16:10
Laura Tedesco
It hasn't and it probably won't hit the media cycle. It's too much in the minutiae for us to expect it'll hit the media cycle. People are very concerned. And people that I work with in Kabul, Afghans, who are in contact with the locals in the immediate vicinity of Noh Gumbad, are reporting on a daily basis. Did the Taliban visit that day? Oh, they came twice that day. Oh, did you take their picture? They wanted a selfie? Okay, what are they doing? How are they treating the site?

16:42
Laura Tedesco
The Taliban requested that structure where the Afghan National Police used to occupy to protect Noh Gumbad be demolished, which it was, they demolished it themselves. Because they didn't want to leave a spot where the police could reoccupy if the Afghan forces were to gain that territory back.

17:04
George Gavrilis
Uh.

17:12
Laura Tedesco
In the scale of what's happening in terms of these daily skirmishes and districts falling to the Taliban, and then the Afghan government retaking these districts, this little three-car garage of a site is so seemingly insignificant in the larger calculus of the political decay of Afghanistan.

17:37
Laura Tedesco
But from a standpoint of what will be remembered 50 years from now, 100 years from now, the destruction of this site will be a lasting legacy of these daily military and political machinations that are happening right now. And that is an aspect of heritage preservation that is often lost to most people. And I don't say that as a criticism. The significance isn't felt until it's too late.

18:23
George Gavrilis
What kind of work did you do there?

18:25
Laura Tedesco
Mostly my work at that time was as an observer, trying to understand that particular site in the context of how significant it is for Afghans today, how significant it is for the region, writ large, and globally, as an extant example of very early Islamic architecture. To weigh all of those things, and then to combine that information about Noh Gumbad and my observations and any sort of library research I did on it with all the other sites in the north I was visiting, so that I could make a recommendation to the U.S. Embassy. Where do you want to push your wheelbarrow of money for cultural preservation? In what direction do you want to go?

19:12
George Gavrilis
I saw pictures of— of archaeologists squeezing some sort of a compound into the cricket carvings of the mosque using a large syringe. What was it for?

19:26
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, they were injecting a kind of stabilizing agent in the interior of the walls, the few remaining walls to keep them stabilized from the inside out. And so it looks kind of odd. It looks like a turkey baster. So it doesn't appear very scientific. But in fact, it is state-of-the-art architectural conservation. And those archaeologists were actually French conservators who were hired because of their specialty to do that work. 

20:08
George Gavrilis
Laurie, you— you seem kind of down as you talk about this.

20:11
Laura Tedesco
Oh, yeah. Thanks, George. I'm probably a little too focused on the news in Afghanistan on a daily basis and absorbing what's going on. I am focused on it in part because my work demands it, but now my personal interest drives a focus on what's happening, and it's not looking particularly promising in terms of long-term stability. And there's just so much violence. It's probably not healthy how much I focus on the news.

20:47
George Gavrilis
Are you thinking about the stability of the country? Or of the work that you've done there over the years?

20:51
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, I think about it maybe hierarchically. First, I think about the safety of the people I know personally, and who I genuinely have deep concern about. I think about— also personal to me, the work that I've really put a lot of energy into for the last 11 years. Does it amount to anything? Could it all be undone in a few short months? Or a couple of years?

21:18
Laura Tedesco
It seems kind of selfish to think about it that way. But I do think about the monuments in Afghanistan and the collective effort to try to preserve them over the last decade, and could it just be obliterated with a badly placed IED or car bomb? Or some angry forces of darkness?

21:46
George Gavrilis
Which ones are you particularly worried about? Which monuments or sites?

21:50
Laura Tedesco
I'm worried about the National Museum in Kabul, not that it'll be directly targeted, but that it could be collaterally destroyed or damaged. I'm worried about some Buddhist sites that have been sort of a focus of work over the years, a site called Topdara in Parwan province. If I recall, it's the region's largest Buddhist stupa. I mean, it's really exquisite. If you were going to Afghanistan, I would say, first stop after you get out of the airport. You drive to this site Topdara. It's only like an hour's drive.

22:26
George Gavrilis
Which is, you know, like super gambling with your life when you're driving an hour in the wrong direction from the airport in Kabul.

22:32
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, you might get killed along the way. But if you made it alive, you'd be very happy to have seen the site.

22:41
George Gavrilis
Yeah. And remind the listeners what a stupa is.

22:44
Laura Tedesco
They're kind of holy signposts and structures that are important for Buddhists.

22:54
Laura Tedesco
"May 16, 2011. 3:20 pm. Waiting for the heat to pass. Alone in my container. And I should be reading. But no energy to crack the book. I don't know where the others are resting. The mountains look so close. And I think that's Uzbekistan. If things were different, maybe I could walk there."

23:22
George Gavrilis
There's a lot in the north. The North is an odd place.

23:25
Laura Tedesco
You know what? I'd actually like to know more, because you know, the North intimately, but from a different perspective than I know it.

23:34
George Gavrilis
Yeah. My work is a lot more sociological and political. I don't know shit about archaeology or, or ancient sites. The North is interesting, because it's always had a very strong separate identity from the rest of Afghanistan, in part because the economy's so different, the migrations have been so different, but also because the North is ethnically very different.

23:56
George Gavrilis
In the north, you talk about populations of Uzbeks and Tajiks, and Turkmen, mixed in with pockets of Pashtun populations and so on. It's a complicated place. And by virtue of its location on the border with Central Asia in the former Soviet Union, it was either militarily really important or an important trade hub, depending on what period you were talking about.

24:23
George Gavrilis
The North was also the backbone of the resistance to the Taliban in the 1990s, and in the 2000s. So a lot of militias rose from the north and helped the U.S. roll back the Taliban. But see, the Taliban got smart in the intervening years, and they realized that it wasn't enough to just rely on heavily ethnic Pashto populations in the Taliban. And so they started to recruit a lot among disaffected people in the north, whether they were Tajik or Uzbek.

24:58
George Gavrilis
And, and the Taliban became pretty good in recent years at recruiting fighters, using local languages and appealing to local issues. And so a lot of districts in the north in recent years started to fall one by one to the Taliban. And so now the North is no different from the rest of Afghanistan in the sense that it looks like a checkerboard in terms of whether districts are controlled by the Taliban or by the national government. So it's a mess.

25:30
George Gavrilis
In fact, as we speak today, there have been some pretty major skirmishes in the province of Balkh, including at the gates of Mazar-i-Sharif. There was even an infiltration of Taliban fighters into Mazar-i-Sharif temporarily, which is pretty terrifying, considering that Mazar is one of the largest cities in the country. So the situation isn't great.

25:49
George Gavrilis
And the Taliban has once again taken control of yet another border post, along the border with Central Asia, this one is the main border crossing with Tajikistan. And it's not just important for symbolic reasons. If you control border crossings, you can control what comes in and out of the country. And you can also collect customs taxes. So it's a really great way for the Taliban to informally start getting customs revenue, and using it to fund their tactical advance across that part of the country. So the situation is pretty sad.

26:29
George Gavrilis
And we just don't know what their commitment is going to be to the country Afghanistan has become over the past 20 years in terms of its constitution and its legal order, and its very, very fragile democracy, women's rights. Now, there are a lot of tremendous unknowns. And the North, which for a while, was a bulwark, and doing relatively well, is no longer doing well. And things are pretty dismal up there.

26:56
Laura Tedesco
My concern is while you have this body of knowledge and the scaffolding of information in your head about how you understand what's happening now and how it relates to things historically that have occurred in the north, that most people will be generally maybe not interested. It's sort of how I feel about it. Like who's interested in this? Maybe the eight people …

27:21
George Gavrilis
Think there were 10.

27:23
Laura Tedesco
Were there 10?

27:24
George Gavrilis
Yeah, there were 10 listeners, but eight of them were Buddhist, remember?

27:27
Laura Tedesco
Yeah. Does that include like your sister?

27:31
George Gavrilis
She's not Buddhist. So she's one of the two.  

27:34
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, she's one of the 10. Anyway—  

27:37
George Gavrilis
I mean, it depends, I suppose it depends. It's true that there are plenty of people that don't give a shit about Afghanistan, and certainly don't give a shit about the intricacies of Afghan history or the ethnic geography of the place. But it's still an interesting place historically, right, because you were saying, this was the stomping ground of Alexander the Great, and Rumi, and Babur.

27:59
Laura Tedesco
Right.

28:05
George Gavrilis
You've been listening to Monuments Woman with Laura Tedesco. I'm your host George Gavrilis. Don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. To stay in touch, also follow us on Instagram, at the_monuments_woman. Join us next week when we dive deeper.

28:21
George Gavrilis
This show is produced by Christian D. Bruun and May Eleven Projects. It is recorded by Audivita Studios, and edited by Shaun Hettinger and Greg Williams. The theme song is This Love by Ariana Delawari, featuring Salar Nader.

Ep 11: Balkh or Bust — Afghanistan's Heritage 

Topics Covered in this Episode 

The North: Mazar-i-Sharif

Noh Gumbad, Balkh, exterior

Haji Piyada

Noh Gumbad, Balkh, interior

Noh Gumbad today, under Taliban control

Cultural heritage, military and political machinations

Laura's work at Noh Gumbad

News of Afghanistan today

The North, politically

Recorded on June 29, 2021