Snookering a Trip to Herat

Last November during Eid-al-Adha, a week-long holiday when the Haj culminates, I was able to escape crowded Kabul for the western city of Herat. An old city-state linked historically with the Persian empire, Herat was known in its 1500s heyday for poetry and miniaturist painting. It’s also famous for the fine tilework on its mausoleums and mosques. Problem was, the Brits leveled structures for clear artillery fire when they feared Russia would attack in the 1880s; then when the Russians did arrive in the 1980s, cultural heritage kind of took a backseat. All the same Herat remains a cultural capital and the sites that remain — and the reconstruction underway — make it a trip worth the effort.

It was also a chance to make the most of a contact I made on the Dubai-Kabul flight three weeks prior. Two 20-something Afghan guys sitting next to me got to talking. When they weren’t clubbing in Dubai, it seems, they were contracting work for coalition forces out of their office in Herat. So, one of them met me at my hotel just after arriving, after an hour flight from Kabul, and whisked me away to see the sights with his armed guard. Nothing like knowing a local.

The Citadel, the tan brick-walled castle, is the highest point in the city proper. You can see how it’s been recently reconstructed (thanks to the Agha Khan Foundation). As “new” as it is, it’s a success story for the city that so much work has been done with a cultural treasure without being sidetracked by politics or conflict. The massive Friday Mosque is the finest Islamic building in the country. We also visited some shrines to poets and saints, the porticos and other details of which are in the pictures. Herat, along with Samarkand and Bukhara in Uzbekistan, was part of Tamerlane’s empire in the late 1300s/early 1400s and so shares tilework and other architectural traits with those cities.

I apologized for contacting him during Eid, but my host Faisal assured me he was “not very religious” and held up his hand. Plus, his business partner — back clubbing already in Dubai — had asked him to show me around, so what could he do. One of the temples he does seem to frequent is a restaurant, 1001 Nights, overlooking the city that features dwarf waiters and shisha pipes. For the uninitiated, shisha is flavored tobacco smoked out of a houka pipe, of Middle Eastern origin but catching on these days worldwide.

There’s no cinema in Herat, “the mullahs will not allow it” says Faisal, so after dinner of rice and lamb kebabs we head for another local pasttime for idle youth, a snooker room. Snooker is played on a billiards table about 50% larger than a pool table, with rather different rules. There’s just a lot more green felt so it’s much harder to sink the balls. Then we go back to his place where his parents live. His father was a tank operator during the Soviet occupation/war, fighting on the government side, so I tell him about the destroyed tanks up in Kunar that the US must have taken out in 2001. His father then tells Faisal that he should not let me go around the town alone due to recent abductions. But, those targets have usually been family members of wealthy Afghans. Lovely.

My last day I get a taxi out to a couple more sites and then sit in the park at the Friday Mosque while the taxi driver prays.  Then, we visit a shop down the street that sells the blue glass Herat is known for, along with just about every antique knick-knack you could imagine, including withering Martini rifles from the British empire days in the 1800s, swords, coins, jewelry, and dishware. I buy an oil lamp and a finger-held stamp of worked silver. The place is straight out of Indiana Jones.

Time to head for the airport. The police do not mess around, making everyone stop on the side of the road — like, on the shoulder — and only ticket holders can walk through their checkpoint. In the security line inside, a cop doesn’t like the fact that I have this old oil lamp. I show him the card from the store, and he tells me to check my backpack. Then, it’s time to board the 30-year old 737 back to Kabul. Seriously, the thing must have been built when I was in grade school, but the flight was smooth as the Silk Road. Even negotiating the mountains ringing Kabul just after dark. Thank goodness Boeing makes good stuff.