I ❤️ Herat

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00:04

Laura Tedesco

One of the projects that has been ongoing since August 15 when the Taliban really just sort of Pac-Manned their way into Kabul, is The University of Chicago. I've been working with them for almost 10 years. The State Department has been supporting them to do a lot of work in the National Museum and with this mobile museums project that we've talked about, of sending artifacts out to schools. They helped produce the Nickelsberg book. 

00:33

Laura Tedesco

They've been a very close contact. I kind of refer to them as the dream team for me. And they have been using declassified satellite imagery to monitor the archaeological landscape as a way to track what is happening to Afghanistan's archaeological sites. 

00:52

Laura Tedesco

Now that there's no one on the ground to be able to verify what's happening— Are sites being looted? Are sites being destroyed through bulldozing? Are new buildings going up on old Bala Hissars? You can see all of this through very high definition satellite imagery.

01:15

Laura Tedesco

That's something that's ongoing, and I hope will continue for many months to come, because that's very important information, because that's really going to touch on the illegal traffic of antiquities out of Afghanistan. And we're already expecting to see a lot of that.

01:33

George Gavrilis

"You can’t stretch your legs in Herat without kicking a poet in the ass." That’s what the emperor Babur had to say about the city in the 15th century— quite a vote of confidence from someone who conquered Central Asia, Afghanistan, and India. 

01:47

George Gavrilis

If Kabul is Afghanistan’s political and economic capital, Herat is certainly the country’s cultural heart. It’s a city of poetry readings and film festivals and imposing 15th century Timurid structures. Like the famous citadel that rises from the crowded marketplace in the center. Baked ochre, tan bricks, rhomboid ramparts, cylindrical towers, square walls, and windows in the shapes of rectangles and circles. The architects of the citadel seem to have been inspired by every shape there is. It looks utterly dreamy against the typically bright blue skies. But the citadel did not always look so grand.

02:28

George Gavrilis

In this two-part episode on Herat, Laurie and I talk about the exhilarating work to restore the once-crumbling citadel and the perils she faced along the way—including gunfire and bombings. We also talk about the unknowns now that the city is under the thumb of the Taliban, and its dignified residents are not scared to speak their minds and take to the streets.

02:52

George Gavrilis
This is Monuments Woman with Laura Tedesco. I'm your host George Gavrilis. Today, we are continuing on Laura's journey into Afghanistan. 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.

03:10

George Gavrilis

We're gonna talk about Herat today.

03:13

Laura Tedesco

Yeah. 

03:14

George Gavrilis

But there's something on your mind. What's on your mind? 

03:18

Laura Tedesco

Yeah, you know, there's a lot on my mind, being so deeply involved for the last weeks on issues related to Afghanistan. And watching really, with a lot of grief, the detrimental changes taking place on the ground. And I'm in touch with Afghans every day. And as we've talked about, I know you consume a lot of news, I consume a lot of news, and I'm seeing narratives come out that really focus on U.S. failure there. 

03:50

Laura Tedesco

And I hear a lot of blame being placed on the manner in which the U.S. withdrawal took place. And I scratch my head. Yes, we can talk about blame or details of how plans were made and implemented on the withdrawal. 

04:08

Laura Tedesco

But when I review the news and the facts, here's what I see: the previous administration announced full troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in February of 2021. Then the administration changes, the new president comes in, he delays that withdrawal. He delays it by, what is it, six months, about six months to end of August. 

04:33

Laura Tedesco

And so the information that the U.S. was leaving was being telegraphed for years. That was the whole reason of negotiating with the Taliban in the first place. So it's as if there was some kind of magical thinking taking place in the narrative that I'm seeing now, of, how could the U.S. abandon Afghanistan? 

04:58

Laura Tedesco

First of all, I don't regard it necessarily as an abandonment. Humanitarian aid is going to be pushed back in large sums very soon. I don't know, I'm frustrated with a sense of the narrative not reflecting the facts as I understood them, as I've read the news. And as I've watched the facts being telegraphed about timelines and what's going to happen. 

05:26

Laura Tedesco

It's not to mitigate the tragedies that happened at the Kabul Ai21.rport those last two weeks in August. Not at all. I spent an all-nighter one night with a group of Afghans who were on their way out trying to get into the Kabul Airport. So was hearing firsthand what they were going through to make that entry and safe passage out. It was harrowing.  

05:48

Laura Tedesco

Maybe it's just, George, that I don't want to accept that maybe the work that I was involved in amounted to nothing, or would be qualified as worth nothing in the end. What do you think?

06:02

George Gavrilis

Oh, man, there's so much I could say so much. So much more that you could say. First of all, you know, we heard from Jamal. 

06:11

Laura Tedesco

Yeah. 

06:13

George Gavrilis

We heard from an Afghan, an Afghan who was not a cultural heritage specialist, who has no skin in your particular game, who said that your work mattered and then it's going to continue to matter. Because it's his country. It's his beautiful country. And so anything you did to keep the culture alive, keep the culture going, was important to him. And he thanked you for that. You have to remember that there are a lot of Afghans that feel like him, that their country matters. The work wasn't in vain.

06:44

George Gavrilis

But there's the bigger story, which is who's to blame for all this. And I have a lot of feelings about this. The first feeling is this, like, I am so sick of going on the news and seeing post-mortems and reports not just from the other side of the political spectrum, or different factions of the Democratic Party, or from think tanks whose job it is to do this.

07:11

George Gavrilis

My concern, just like your concern, has been on the here and now, and what remains the humanitarian response. There will be time for the post-mortems. But I'm really tired of seeing post-mortems crowding out the here-and-now news, and still continuing to crowd out news about what's happening in Afghanistan, outside of Kabul. We still know so little, the reports are getting better, but they're still woefully inadequate. 

07:35

Laura Tedesco 

Yeah, it's true. 

07:36

George Gavrilis

One of the things behind your frustration is certainly that people want to wholesale blame the Biden administration, or they wholesale want to blame the U.S. And we know and our friends in Afghanistan know, and they're very honest about this, that they, too, are characters and actors in their own story.

07:56

George Gavrilis

And we all know we could have done better. And we all know that we participated in events the way they turned out. My objection to what happened over the past seven weeks with our government— Well, there were two. 

08:11

George Gavrilis

One is that I continue to find our elected officials impervious to communication, really hard to reach. I can't get any of them to respond on where I can turn to to help people. And I find that really galling. And I'm not some unhinged crank off the street. I know my shit. 

08:31

George Gavrilis

But what really upsets me about our withdrawal is that as we saw the Taliban racing across Afghanistan, we did not tactically alter anything. As we saw the Taliban breaching Kabul, taking over the city, taking over the government buildings, we left our embassy and treated the airport as a node. Even when that was proven to be a bad decision and unsafe, we didn't tactically change it.  

09:00

George Gavrilis

My big thing is I just wanted to see tactical changes to the changing situation on the ground. And all I saw was full speed ahead. And we have a great military, we have really great people in the government. There could have been tactical adjustments, and maybe we would be in a similar situation today. But maybe everything would have been less chaotic, less ugly. Maybe we wouldn't have seen young Afghans falling out of planes. 

09:26

George Gavrilis

Maybe we wouldn't have seen people waiting in sewage ditches for days at a time to get into the airport. There had to be a better way to do it. There just had to be. And I recognize, like you said before, that it was nothing short of miraculous that we in fact evacuated well over 100,000 people from that one janky runway, right? 

09:46

Laura Tedesco

I think one of the variables is that no one predicted the Kabul government was going to fall within the hours that it fell. That genuinely surprised people in the Kabul government themselves. So the tactical changes that you're wishing had taken place— Now we're kind of doing the post-mortem that we said we both don't really like, but— 

10:12

George Gavrilis

Well, yeah, because we're total hypocrites. But that's okay.

10:16

Laura Tedesco

Yeah. [laughing] But I mean, that's sort of the wild card. That was the Joker card in all of this, like no one expected that Joker card to be pulled out and the Kabul government to fall within the span of six hours, and Ghani to get on a plane to Tajikistan or the Gulf or wherever he went first.

10:35

Laura Tedesco

This has all been on my mind a lot and I'm glad I can kind of vent with you because at my house, my kids don't really want to have me discuss this at dinner time. They'd really rather watch, you know, Top Chef or something.

10:48

George Gavrilis

Wait, you watch TV while you eat dinner? 

10:51

Laura Tedesco

Stop it. Don't judge me.

10:53

George Gavrilis

[laughing] Laurie, you have officially been judged. 

10:57

Laura Tedesco

George, when your kids are teenagers, you might change your tune with the everybody-sitting-down-and-eating-together thing. 

11:06

George Gavrilis

I'm not sure you have a TV. Do you have a TV? 

11:08

Laura Tedesco

We do have a TV— it rarely turns on. You know, everybody has a device, George, like an iPad. I don't even eat dinner with my kids, truth be told. They eat first and then I eat at like nine-thirty at night. This is not really the topic for the podcast. Like my dinner schedule. 

11:25

George Gavrilis

No.

11:29

Laura Tedesco

Anyway— 

11:29

George Gavrilis

Wait, can I say, though, you did make the most amazing Gruyère tart. Oh my god. 

11:35

Laura Tedesco

Hmm. I know that's a good one. 

11:37

George Gavrilis

Yeah. We need the recipe up on the blog.

11:40

Laura Tedesco

Okay, yeah, that's a favorite. I'm glad you liked it. 

11:49

George Gavrilis

We all played a hand on this— the U.S. government, every single part of it. People like us that worked on development projects— we participated in it. Our Afghan friends who became experts in this area or that area who worked for, let's say, the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development. We all played in it.

12:10

George Gavrilis

I guess our conclusion is that this is not the time for post-mortems even as we do it a little bit here, but that we all played a part. There's no single place to point the finger. 

12:24

Laura Tedesco

So, I'm glad I get to talk to you about these things. And we can kind of mutually vent, because you know the timelines, we can reference the names and the places, and we all watched it happen together.

12:37

George Gavrilis

Yeah.

12:37

Laura Tedesco

So, thank you.

12:44

Laura Tedesco

Yeah. You know, we've talked about Nancy Dupree a couple of times. One of our previous discussions I was telling you the story about this billboard campaign, and that was to put billboards up all over the country and that— 

12:58

George Gavrilis

Yeah, great story. 

12:59

Laura Tedesco

—the billboards were supposed to be up for six months. And I remember driving past where one of the billboards had been changed, meaning somebody pulled a fast one and, you know, changed the billboard even though we were still paying to have billboards featuring cultural preservation. 

13:14

Laura Tedesco

And I remember being so frustrated that the Afghan was telling me, No, madam, that billboard is still there. And I was like, No, it's not. And I went to Nancy Dupree after that, and said to Nancy: Nancy, Do you ever feel like, you just want to leave this place, like it's all just too crazy? Her answer surprised me, you know, 'coz she lived probably for 50 years in Afghanistan. 

13:42

George Gavrilis

She was as Afghan as a non-Afghan gets. 

13:45

Laura Tedesco

Pretty much.

13:46

George Gavrilis

Yeah. 

13:46

Laura Tedesco

And her answer was, "Aaah!" you know, she sort of spoke like that she goes, "Aaah! Of course I want to leave every day."

13:55

George Gavrilis

[laughing]

13:58

Laura Tedesco

And I was both surprised and somehow gratified by her answer that she felt the frustration that I felt. But she clearly never left because she ended up dying in Kabul. Alas.

14:13

George Gavrilis

Alas. Yeah.

14:18

George Gavrilis

Hey, my friend, can we talk about Afghanistan's cultural capital?

14:23

Laura Tedesco
Yes, Herat.

14:25

George Gavrilis

Okay, here's what I want to know. So, I largely know Herat from history books, and it is like the shit. It's the place to be in history, in terms of its culture and its refinement, even though it doesn't necessarily look like much today.

14:40

Laura Tedesco

Right. 

14:41

George Gavrilis

But I want to know, as somebody historically minded, cultural heritage preservation specialist, archaeologist, that you are, what are you picturing before you get to Herat? What do you imagine the city feels and looks like?

14:54

Laura Tedesco

I didn't really know what to expect. I knew I was going out to Herat. I was terrifically excited to go there, but it wasn't in my head what it was going to look like.

15:08

Laura Tedesco

So, it had at that time, a more languid feel than Kabul. Even the trees looked different and were kind of drapey and more shady than in Kabul. And the women wore different clothes. It had a much more Iranian influence with the long black chador or the black and white one. So they would walk along the streets in groups and appear billowing and flowy, and moving a little more slowly. 

15:38

Laura Tedesco

And then the monuments that I visited were just spectacular. All of them fixer-uppers. But for me, that was beside the point that they were fixer-uppers. I have maybe this ability to picture what they may have looked like in their heyday rather than say— you go to the center of Herat there's all these minarets that once stood and they all look like smokestacks now. But they would have been covered in this glistening blue tile and dominated the landscape. But now they look like broken smokestacks. But I thought they looked fantastic.

16:18

George Gavrilis
Well, I love that you've described historical monuments as fixer-uppers. So I feel like if you do get fired, which is something that you sometimes worry about, you have a great career flipping monuments on HGTV. 

16:31

Laura Tedesco

That's brilliant!

16:31

George Gavrilis

They can call you Monument Flipper. 

16:34

Laura Tedesco

That is a fantastic idea, George. 

16:37

George Gavrilis

Why not?

16:38

Laura Tedesco

I'm gonna move that up to my plan B after Home Depot. 

16:46

George Gavrilis

Tell us a little bit about these monuments around the city. What are they like, where are they placed? Are there kids kicking soccer balls against the walls of a tomb?

16:52

Laura Tedesco

Yeah, kind of like that. Herat's a fairly big city. I don't know the population. I'm going to guess a couple of million. I'd have to look up, but it's a big bustling city. And it's got large avenues and busy roads and markets. And the monuments, they're part of the city. There's the big Friday mosque, there's the Citadel of Herat, which is at the center of the city. And then there's what's referred to as the Musalla complex, which is this Timurid complex of buildings and mausoleums and these minarets, which I affectionately refer to as smokestacks. And other mausoleums, cemeteries. They're all placed intermittently around modern buildings and homes and busy roads.

17:40

Laura Tedesco

Maybe not dissimilar to Athens. Although, you're Greek, you can speak better to that. I'm trying to think of an analogy. Maybe like Rome, you know when you're walking around Rome, and you turn a corner, and there's something that's 2,000 years old—

17:55

George Gavrilis

— right, like a random column. 

17:57

Laura Tedesco

Right. 

17:57

George Gavrilis

Not necessarily a whole temple, but you know, some little piece of something that used to be much bigger.

18:02

Laura Tedesco
Yes. And then you turn another corner, and there's a Renaissance church.

18:07

George Gavrilis
Yeah. Yeah. So Herat's population is officially five to 600,000.

18:12

Laura Tedesco

Hmmm.

18:13

George Gavrilis

It's rather smaller than Kandahar and smaller than Marazi-Sharif, I think, as well.

18:18

Laura Tedesco
Yeah, I think it is smaller than Mazar. That's a little smaller than I expected.

18:22

George Gavrilis

But having said that, official statistics are always a bit tricky in Afghanistan, because usually the populations of urban centers, in particular, are swelled by people who are there for opportunity. And so there are times when it's underestimated by 30–40%.

18:38

Laura Tedesco
Yeah, and there's never been an official census done in Afghanistan. So it's another issue. 

18:47

George Gavrilis

So when you're going to Herat, what's the mission? What do you know you're going to do? And what do you hope you're going to do? 

18:53

Laura Tedesco

So the mission had a couple of objectives. It was to first see the Citadel of Herat, which the United States had been providing support for its restoration already for well over a year, a couple of years prior to my arriving in Herat, and to go check on the status of that work.

19:16

Laura Tedesco

And then, like I did when I went to other cities across Afghanistan for the first time, was to evaluate the monumental landscape and to see, are there other sites out here where the United States could also push some support for preservation. And so it was not just to look at monuments but to meet with say, the governor of Herat with whom I met at that time, and with local officials and a few archaeologists and some civil society leaders. 

19:49

Laura Tedesco

As well as maybe squeeze in a visit to a carpet shop and see if there was a carpet I could purchase, or — I mean, the carpet thing, that was an aside, and not at all why I went out there. But it was to understand better the operational environment and the monumental environment.

20:09

George Gavrilis

I love the way that you had a disclaimer— I did not go there to carpet-shop. You were totally okay sharing the story about how you ditched the university in Kabul and the safety of its perimeter to go have lunch at some random Korean restaurant in Kabul with Nancy Dupree. But that's what I like about you.

20:25

Laura Tedesco

You cannot say no, yeah, you cannot say no to Nancy Dupree. 

20:28

George Gavrilis

Cannot say no to Nancy Dupree. Yeah. 

20:32

George Gavrilis

Okay. So so the Citadel then— so when were you there because you said the work had started a couple years before?

20:39

Laura Tedesco
Yeah, my first visit to Herat was in early November of 2010. So I had already been working in Afghanistan for a few months. And I was chomping at the bit to get to Herat and it just couldn't come together. Because you've got to coordinate with 15 people and schedule it and make sure when you arrive, there's a place for you to sleep. I mean, there's lots of planning that has to take place.

21:04

George Gavrilis

Describe what the Citadel looked like, as you approached it, as you walked up the ramparts, as you walked through the internal area.

21:12

Laura Tedesco

The circumstances of my visiting the Citadel were very fortunate because of various scheduling conflicts. I was sent to look at the Citadel by myself. Other people that I was with had other activities that they needed to do. 

21:28

George Gavrilis

That was a good thing?

21:29

Laura Tedesco

It was for me. So I could take it all in myself without having to answer questions, which I might not have known the answer to, or really talk to anyone. 

21:39

George Gavrilis

You just make it up. 

21:40

Laura Tedesco

I could just make it up. Yeah. And the timing of my visit was also very fortuitous. It happened to be in the late afternoon. And when you're in the interior of the Herat Citadel, in the late afternoon, the setting sun creates the most beautiful play of light and shadow within the Citadel. That was completely by luck that I was there and the place was nearly deserted.

22:11

Laura Tedesco
So I was walking around. I had a security minder, but he was a distance away and not really with me, he was not right on my side. And so I was able to explore, and what felt very personal to me. I was practically alone. There were no other visitors, except, as I approached the highest rampart —

22:38

Laura Tedesco

To explain, this is a site where it has enormous exterior walls. I'm talking like 12-, 15-, 18-feet thick exterior walls. And you enter in through a double-storey, like this magnificent doorway with one of those drawbridge doors that comes down covering a moat.

22:59

George Gavrilis
Yeah. 

23:00

Laura Tedesco

So you enter, you're transitioning into this space. And then it opens up into a kind of open area. And there's a small amphitheater that was created as part of the restoration and these hallways and alleys, and it's about the size of a stadium. So to give you a sense of the scale. 

23:20

Laura Tedesco

And I walk up to the far end, with the upper rampart and the interior, and I see a lone couple, who were clearly not Afghan, and they're very tall and very slender, and which must have stood out because they were casting shadows that looked also very tall and slender, because of the sunlight and the way the sunlight was coming in. 

23:45

Laura Tedesco

And I'm by myself and I walked up to them and asked if they wouldn't mind to take my picture, which is something kind of uncharacteristic for me.

23:53

George Gavrilis
Very, Yeah. 

23:55

Laura Tedesco

And it turned out it was the French ambassador and his wife, who were also there for a visit. And they had their own security minders around them who don't figure prominently in my memory, like I remember this is a very empty place. And they were gracious and lovely and introduced themselves with no pretense, and of course they were happy to take my picture. And I took their picture and then we went about our business. So that aside, and I don't think I ever saw them again—

24:26

George Gavrilis

Did you put in a good word for Philipp?

24:28

Laura Tedesco

I don't think I did. 

24:31

George Gavrilis

Right, your French archaeologist friend from DAFA.

24:33

Laura Tedesco

I don't remember like, hey, have you had the cheese at Philipp's place?

24:39

George Gavrilis

But this was the French ambassador, not the Consul General in Herat? I don't even know if France had a consulate in Herat. 

24:43

Laura Tedesco

They didn't. No, they didn't. In fact, the Italians were the most prominent presence in Herat at that time. The Italian military I met with a couple of times out there. But I don't know why the French ambassador was in Herat, but there he was with his lovely wife. 

25:02

Laura Tedesco

That's a footnote in my visit. What I'm trying to explain to you— First impressions mean a lot, right? My first impression of the Herat Citadel was very formative for me in that I got the luck of being there in the late afternoon when the light was such that it created this dramatic feel of the architecture, perhaps as it was intended. And—

25:27

George Gavrilis

I was going to ask you about that, if you knew if the architects had meant for the light coming through the West over the Iranian border to create that effect.

25:38

Laura Tedesco
Yes, but when it was built there wasn't that Iranian border, so—

25:42

George Gavrilis

That's true. 

25:44

Laura Tedesco

It was all part of the same empire. But nevertheless. And I did, I did buy a carpet. 

25:50

George Gavrilis

Cool. 

25:51

Laura Tedesco

But it was at night. 

25:52

George Gavrilis

Nobody blames you.

25:52

Laura Tedesco

It was at night after hours, like it wasn't on work time. 

25:55

George Gavrilis

Like after 5pm. Okay. 

25:57

Laura Tedesco

Yeah, it was like after dinner, yeah.

25:59

George Gavrilis

Ha.

26:04

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.

26:22

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 23: I ❤️ Herat — Herat, Part 1 of 2

Topics Covered in this Episode
On narratives that focus on U.S. failure
The worth of Laura's work in Afghanistan
Blame and post-mortems
Nancy Dupree and the billboard campaign
Herat, Afghanistan's cultural capital
Monument fixer-uppers
Monuments in the city
The Herat mission
Experiencing Citadel of Herat the first time
The French Ambassador and his wife
The light at the Citadel

Recorded on October 7, 2021