Ghazni

Ghazni's importance came from its position on the plateau road between Kabul, the Indus and the south. Before Islam the area was Buddhist, and the monastery on the hill at Tapa Sardar, with its stupas and painted clay figures, was in use for centuries. In 977 a Turkic commander, Sabuktigin, made the town the seat of a new dynasty, and under his son Mahmud, who ruled from 998 to 1030, Ghazni became the capital of an empire stretching from Iran to northern India.

That was the town's great age. Mahmud's raids into India brought immense plunder, and he spent it on mosques, palaces and gardens and on a court of scholars and poets; Ferdowsi is said to have presented the Shahnameh, the Persian book of kings, to him here, and the scientist al-Biruni worked at the court. The two star-shaped brick towers that still stand on the plain were raised by Mas'ud III and Bahram Shah in the 12th century, near a royal palace whose carved marble has been excavated. Around 1150 the Ghurid ruler Ala al-Din, remembered as the World Burner, sacked Ghazni, and the Mongols devastated it in the following century; the capital never recovered its rank.

What followed was long provincial obscurity. The citadel above the old town was stormed by a British force in 1839 during the First Anglo-Afghan War. In the 20th century Ghazni became a modest provincial capital on the new Kabul–Kandahar highway. It was fought over during the Soviet war and the civil war, and the town and the highway through it were repeatedly contested between 2001 and 2021, when a major assault reached the centre in 2018.

Ghazni's identity rests on a medieval reputation it has outlived. The town was one of the great centres of Persian literature and Islamic learning under the Ghaznavids, and that memory is kept alive locally in the names of its monuments and in the scholarly tradition attached to it; in 2013 it was designated by an Islamic cultural organisation as a capital of Islamic civilisation for the year, which brought a round of restoration and new building.

The province mixes peoples. The town itself is of mixed population — Tajik, Hazara and Pashtun — and the eastern districts are largely Pashtun, of Ghilzai tribes, while the western districts of the province — Jaghori, Malistan and others — are Hazara and Shia, and Dari and Hazaragi are spoken alongside Pashto. That division runs through Ghazni's social life and has at times been a source of tension. Tribal custom weighs heavily on the Pashtun side, with disputes settled by jirga, the council of elders, and hospitality, honour and sanctuary governed by Pashtunwali.

Daily manners follow the Afghan pattern: long greetings, repeated enquiries after family and health, tea pressed on any visitor, shoes left at the door. Public life is male; women's lives are lived within the family compound, and restrictions since 2021 on schooling, work and travel have been felt sharply in a province where Hazara districts in particular had sent large numbers of girls to school. Weddings are the main social occasions, with the attan danced to drums.

Ghazni town has roughly 200,000 people and is the capital of a mostly rural province. Life divides between the walled old town, where mud-brick houses are packed below the citadel, and the newer strip along the highway, where the shops, transport offices and government buildings are. Outside the town, villages of walled compounds sit among fields watered from wells, streams off the mountains and underground karez channels.

Farming and trade carry the economy. The plateau grows wheat, barley, potatoes and apples, and Ghazni has a name for its apples and dried fruit; sheep and goats graze the dry uplands, and Kuchi nomads pass through with their flocks on the way between summer and winter pasture. The highway brings the rest: haulage, fuel, workshops and the roadside trade that comes with a place halfway between Kabul and Kandahar. Many families depend on money sent home from Kabul, Iran or Pakistan.

Days are shaped by cold and distance. Winter closes the town in for months, fuel is expensive, and heavy snow can cut villages off. Electricity is intermittent, and solar panels are common on roofs. Drought in recent years has cut harvests and lowered wells, and the collapse of aid and public salaries after 2021 has left unemployment and poverty severe. Friday is for prayer and family visits.

Ghazni eats the plain food of the cold plateau. Bread from a clay tandoor comes with every meal and with tea at breakfast; shorwa, a mutton broth with bread torn into it, is the winter staple, and kebabs of lamb or minced meat grilled over charcoal are the standard of the bazaar and the highway restaurants. Palaw, rice steamed over lamb stock and topped with carrot and raisins in the Kabuli manner, appears for guests and at weddings.

Potatoes, pulses and dairy fill out the rest. Qurut, yoghurt dried into hard balls and soaked again into a sharp sauce, is poured over bread and dumplings, particularly in the Hazara districts west of the town, where mantu and aushak — steamed dumplings of minced meat or of chives, under yoghurt and a meat or lentil sauce — are everyday cooking. Kichiri, a thick porridge of rice and pulses, is another highland dish.

Fruit is the town's local pride. Ghazni's apples are known across the country, and apricots, mulberries and grapes are dried for the winter and set out for visitors with almonds and walnuts. Dried mulberries pounded with walnuts make a sweet paste eaten in the cold months. Green tea with cardamom is drunk all day, black tea with sugar in winter, and alcohol is prohibited.