It was late October 1957 when a single engined plane took off from Bamiyan, Afghanistan, the valley where then the huge Buddha images were still intact in their mountainside wall niches, like ‘whales in a dry dock’ as Robert Byron reported. The destination, Herat, 300 kilometres west across the Ghor Mountains, should have been easy to find. But something went wrong; the pilot strayed north and then saw something which made him circle, look again and circle again.
He reached Herat and reported what he had seen and was not believed. But a year later two French archaeologists went to investigate. After scouting unpopulated valleys and connecting passes for several days, they rounded a rock shoulder and saw a pinnacle, russet and decorated; the same sight that had astonished the airman. Hidden at the junctions of two rivers and three gorges was a 70 metre high column standing alone, an elegant tapering candle.
It is now called The Minaret of Djam because it looks like a minaret and the area is called Djam. Little is known about it other than it is attributed to the Ghorid Sultan of the late 12th century, whose name is inscribed on it. So in historical context its contemporaries would be such as Ankhor Wat, Durham Cathedral and the first phase of Notre Dame. And it had been lost to most of the world for nearly 800 years. It could be all that remains from the Ghorid capital, known as the Turquoise Mountain (Firozkoh), whose location has never been established. It is known that some 40 years after the minaret was built, Genghiz Khan and his marauding army destroyed the city and most of its inhabitants. But if they did so, why leave the column, which may have been some sort of victory tower? There are contemporary examples of similar towers in India and Afghanistan, such as Delhi’s Qutb Minar. But why would a victory tower be hidden from view in a gorge, with even its top below the level of the surrounding mountains. And if this were indeed Firozkoh, where was the rest of the city? There are no more than two hundred square metres of ground around the minaret for mosque or any other structures. Certainly the mud brick residences that would have then, as now, have been the typical dwellings, could have clung to some of the mountain sides, but hardly enough for an imperial capital.
To reach the Minaret of Djam became for me an ambition. It enticed like Timbuctoo; something so unlikely, so apparently out of place, a Reubens in a refugee camp. But for most of the time it has been inaccessible given the forty years of war and civil war that has been the history of Afghanistan since the 1979 Soviet invasion, which was dressed up as a support mission. A few years ago I consulted Rory Stewart, who had managed to see it on his 2002 Leigh Fermor-like walk across the country, and he told me that I was more likely to become a secondary pawn in the kidnap trade that get there.
Whatever the other issues, the return of Taliban control has restricted conflict in the country and this year it was time to try to get there. At the centre table of the Garrick one lunch last August I mentioned that I planned to try to go in April and immediately two fellow diners asked to join. One is an actor who was to gather a crowd reciting Hamlet in a Herat caravanserai; the other an ex-chorister, who did much the same testing the acoustics of an 8thC Buddhist cave, whilst our Taliban assigned minder, who thought we had not spotted him, looked on from outside.
It is a 4 day journey the way we came from the Uzbek border and through the celebrated Salang Tunnel pass across the Hindu Kush and then a 2 day journey on to Herat. There are no paved roads or tourist facilities, but none were expected. The last few hours on sheep paths through the Ghor heighten the anticipation and it does not disappoint. It stands alone, serene and proud, the covered with squares, mazes, patterns, pointed stars and intricacies; ‘…the whole slender structure stands as its builders saw it, eight centuries passing over it like the Sleeping Beauty, with little except the rustle of poplars and the voice of birds and water to disturb its sleep.’ wrote Freya Stark, when she found the minaret in 1970.
The only access to the minaret is via a rope pulley system to get one across the 50 metre wide branch of the Hari Rud river.. I climbed one of the surrounding rock faces to look at the glorious minaret resting in its cosy seclusion below. There are rudimentary remains of structures up above but so small and isolated that it is hard to imagine a city surrounding our beautiful minaret.
The worry is that it is unstable. There is a noticeable northward list towards the river that will become worse. After standing here, unseen, for nearly nine centuries it would be a strange fate if it were to fall just as the world begins, once again, to notice it.
