Bala Hissar of Balkh

Around the small modern town of Balkh in northern Afghanistan rise vast walls of packed earth, the remains of one of the oldest cities of Central Asia. This was Bactra, capital of Bactria, the Bakhdhi of the Avesta and the Bactrian satrapy of the Achaemenid kings. Arab geographers called it Umm al-Bilad, “the mother of cities”. At its heart is the Bala Hissar, “the high fortress”, a roughly circular walled enclosure about a kilometre across, with a citadel raised in its south-eastern part.

Beyond it, a later rampart encloses a much larger area of some eight square kilometres. On the south side this outer wall is especially well preserved, rising in places to around twenty-five metres and strengthened by round towers. Generations of rebuilding, from antiquity through the Islamic centuries, are folded into these walls of mud and brick.

Balkh holds a large place in Iranian memory. In the Shahnameh, Ferdowsi's Book of Kings, it is the city of King Goshtasp, at whose court Zoroaster brought his teaching, and later tradition long linked the prophet with Balkh. It was a great centre of Buddhist learning before Islam and of Persian literature after it: the tenth-century poet Rabia Balkhi, among the first women to write poetry in Persian, is buried here, and the poet Rumi, born in 1207, is known in Persian as Mawlana Balkhi, though historians note he may have been born in the nearby town of Vakhsh.

In 1220 the armies of Genghis Khan destroyed the city, and travellers a century later found it largely in ruins. French archaeologists, beginning with Alfred Foucher in the 1920s, searched these mounds for the Greek city of Bactra. Close by, the fifteenth-century shrine of Khwaja Abu Nasr Parsa, with its fluted turquoise dome, still draws visitors to the town.