Noh Gonbad Mosque

The Noh Gonbad, “nine domes”, is a small ruined mosque a few kilometres south of the modern town of Balkh in northern Afghanistan. It is also known as the mosque of Haji Piyada, “the pilgrim on foot”. It is generally dated to the ninth century, in the time of the Abbasid caliphs, which makes it one of the oldest Islamic buildings in Afghanistan and one of the earliest surviving mosques in the eastern Islamic world.

The plan is a square of nine equal bays, each once covered by its own small dome, carried on thick round columns. The domes have long since fallen, and for centuries the building lay half buried, so that only the tops of the columns and arches showed above the ground. What makes it remarkable is its decoration: the columns and arches are covered with deeply carved stucco, vine scrolls, rosettes and leaves, closely related to the stucco of the Abbasid capital at Samarra in Iraq.

The mosque was brought to scholarly attention in the 1960s, when the art historian Lisa Golombek published it as an Abbasid building. Since then archaeologists have cleared earth from around the columns and built protective roofs over them to shield the stucco from rain and snow. Small as it is, it records how the forms of Baghdad and Samarra reached Balkh, then one of the great cities of Khorasan, whose governors and scholars moved between the caliph's court and the eastern provinces. Standing among the fields, with the snowy line of the Hindu Kush far to the south, the stubby carved columns are a reminder of how much of early Islamic Khorasan has been lost, and how much may still lie under its soil.