Fayzabad

Badakhshan has been known far beyond its mountains for one commodity: the lapis lazuli mined at Sar-e-Sang in the Kokcha valley, traded to Mesopotamia and Egypt thousands of years ago and used for the blue in the jewellery of ancient courts. The routes that carried it ran through the valleys around the site of Fayzabad long before any town stood there, and the region's rubies and gold added to its reputation among medieval geographers.

The town itself is comparatively recent. Local Uzbek and Tajik rulers governed Badakhshan as a distinct principality into the 19th century, often loosely tied to Kabul, Bukhara or Kunduz, and Fayzabad emerged as its seat on the Kokcha, replacing Munjan as the capital of Badakhshan. Emir Abdur Rahman Khan annexed the region in 1888, after which the town recovered its importance as a place of trade, and the boundary settlements agreed with Britain and Russia at the end of that century fixed the Panj river as the northern border and left Afghanistan the narrow Wakhan corridor reaching east towards China.

Remoteness shaped the modern story. The Soviet-Afghan war and the civil wars that followed reached Badakhshan, but during the civil war of the 1990s the province was one of the main power bases of the Northern Alliance, whose political head, Burhanuddin Rabbani, was a native of Badakhshan, and Fayzabad remained its administrative centre. After 2001 aid organisations and a provincial reconstruction effort brought roads, an airstrip, schools and a hospital, and the town grew quickly. The province passed to the Taliban with the rest of the country in 2021, and aid has since fallen sharply.

Badakhshan's people are mostly Tajik and Persian-speaking, and the Dari heard in Fayzabad has its own mountain accent, distinct from Kabul's. East of the town, in the upper valleys and the Wakhan, live Pamiri peoples — the Wakhi above all — who speak Eastern Iranian languages unrelated to Dari, and many of them are Ismaili Shia rather than Sunni, which gives the far east of the province a religious life of its own, centred on community prayer houses rather than mosques.

Music and poetry hold a strong place. Badakhshan has folk styles of its own, drawing on Pamiri, Tajik and Uzbek traditions and played at weddings and gatherings, and poetry and storytelling are largely oral, kept in Dari and the Pamiri languages. Hospitality is close to obligatory: a guest is fed before anything else is discussed, and refusing tea is hard to do politely.

Life is organised around the extended family and the village, with elders settling disputes and labour shared at harvest and at house-building. Men and women's spaces are separate in most households, and dress is conservative throughout. Nowruz, the Persian New Year, has long been the great spring celebration in the mountains, marking the end of the winter isolation, although it is no longer recognised as an official holiday. Opium poppy was grown as a cash crop on small, remote plots in the province's isolated valleys until a ban in 2022, and the drug trade and addiction have left their mark.

Fayzabad is small — its population is estimated at about 85,000 — but it is the largest settlement for a very long way and the administrative, medical and trading centre of a province of about 1.2 million people. The town runs along the Kokcha, with a bazaar street at its core, government compounds set back from it, and houses climbing the terraces above.

Work is farming, trade, transport and government. The valleys grow wheat, maize, mulberries, apricots and walnuts on narrow irrigated terraces, and livestock is taken up to summer pasture; the town handles the goods that come up from Kunduz and the plains, and the movement of people and supplies further east. Public salaries, teaching and the hospital support many households, and remittances from relatives working abroad matter a great deal. Mining, above all lapis, has long been a source of both income and conflict.

The day starts early, with the bazaar busiest in the morning and quiet during the afternoon. Winter shapes everything: households lay in flour, fuel and dried food before the snow, roads close, and prices rise. Poverty is deep, electricity supply is intermittent, drought has hit harvests in recent years, and the ending of much international aid after 2021 removed a large part of the local economy. As elsewhere in the country, restrictions on girls' secondary education and on women's work apply here.

Mountain cooking is plain, filling and built on bread, dairy and rice. Naan baked in a tandoor accompanies every meal, and shorwa — a long-simmered soup of lamb, potato and whatever vegetables are to hand — is poured over torn bread in a shared bowl. Palaw, rice steamed with meat, carrots and raisins, appears at any gathering worth the name, and chalaw, plain rice, is eaten with qorma, a stew of meat and onions.

Dairy is the winter store. Milk from sheep, goats and cattle becomes yoghurt, curd and qurut, hard balls of salted dried yoghurt that keep for months and are soaked and beaten into a tart white sauce for dumplings and rice dishes. Mantu, steamed dumplings of minced meat and onion, and ashak, filled with leek, are festive food here as across the north. Bolani, a flatbread stuffed with potato or leek and fried, is sold in the bazaar.

The valleys are orchard country. Mulberries are the signature fruit, eaten fresh in early summer and dried in quantity for the winter, sometimes ground with walnuts into a dense sweet paste; apricots, apples and walnuts are dried the same way. Tea is drunk all day, usually green and unsweetened, poured from a pot kept refilled, with sheer chai, a salted or sweetened milk tea, for cold mornings. Alcohol is prohibited.