Babur's Garden

Bagh-e Babur, Babur's Garden, lies on a hillside in Kabul, laid out in terraces facing west towards the mountains. Bagh is Persian for garden. Zahir al-Din Babur, the Timurid prince from the Fergana valley who founded the Mughal empire of India, loved Kabul and created gardens there; when he died in Agra in 1530, he asked to be buried in the city, and his remains were later brought here.

The garden follows the terraced Persian form, with a central axis running down the slope, water channels and cascades from level to level, and rows of plane trees. Babur's grave lies on one of the upper terraces, a simple marble grave left open to the sky, as he is said to have wished. Below it stands a small white marble mosque built under his descendant Shah Jahan in the mid-seventeenth century.

The garden suffered badly during the wars of the late twentieth century, losing trees and walls. Between 2002 and 2008 the Aga Khan Trust for Culture led a restoration that rebuilt the terraces, replanted trees and restored the walls and pavilions. Today it is one of Kabul's favourite public spaces, where families picnic on the grass under the plane trees and look out over the city Babur wrote of with such affection in his memoirs, the Baburnama.