Piecing together Afghanistan’s Bamyan Buddhas

04 June 2019

Lisa Choegyal

Bamyan Valley and the enclosure where the Buddha figure once stood

The baked biscuit cliffs of Bamyan shimmered in the dawn glow, the massive blank Buddha niches gaping like painfully missing molars.

We had arrived by road late the night before and, stumbling out of the guesthouse with dew dampening my bare feet, I was not prepared for the vista across the valley. Tidy green fields studded with fortified farms, mud houses huddled under the pockmarked precipice, and nude bare hills rising behind, faintly dusted with snow and dark shadows.

Generations of Silk Road travellers and pilgrims must have gazed with equal wonder as they plied the trade routes through this northern valley of Afghanistan, a prosperous enclave strategically positioned between several great empires, and with Buddhist linkages to Ladakh and Mustang.

The two gigantic 6th century Buddhas, standing solid a quarter of a mile apart and towering 55m and 38m tall, would have appeared very differently to those early visitors, their plaster veneer resonating with red, blue and gold decorations haloed in yellow and white.

The main bodies had been hewn from rock, but the details and dress were enhanced with a mixture of mud, plaster, straw and horsehair coated with stucco. ‘Neither has any artistic value,’ sniffed travel writer Robert Byron 100 years ago, but their gaudy monumental mass, placid gaze and Gandhara-style draped robes could not have failed to impress.

Thousands of monks inhabited temple caves that surrounded the two huge figures, their alcoves now eerily empty, hollowed out of the soft stone over the whole height of the rock face and decorated with frescoes in bright hues. One story tells of a mother who took 12 years to recover her lost son, so extensive was the labyrinth of grotto dwellings carved into the compressed clay and gravel cliffs.

Only a few fragments of colour remained when I first visited Bamyan on an ADB tourism mission in 2005 and again in 2006, but we could still make out the paths used to piously circumambulate the Buddhas. Ruined trails and crumbled stairways precariously connected the intricate network of chambers, but I was not brave enough to climb with the others to dizzying head level.

At their feet, heaps of rubble, rock and plaster were laboriously sorted and conserved by UNESCO and ICOMOS teams. In their scorching tin-roofed shack store, dust motes circled in sunlit rays. We were shown metal shards embedded in some of the pieces, remains of the dynamite, bullets and bombs used in their brutal destruction.

The colossal Buddhas were blown to bits by the Taliban in March 2001, declared as ‘false idols’ and cheered by hundreds, including Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden, who flew in to witness the spectacle. Several weeks and many attempts were needed to demolish them, anti-aircraft fire and rockets had little effect, and eventually timed explosives were placed within the dove nests and bored into the statues, planted under duress at rifle point by unwilling prisoners dangled on ropes from above.

Ancient texts tell of a third giant Nirvana Buddha reclining in the vicinity but he is yet to be located by archaeologists, perhaps kept secret for safekeeping. The crumbling ochre citadel of Shahr-e-Gholghola, meaning city of screams, sighs or lamentations, was destroyed by Genghis Khan in a 1221 massacre.

Departing with my colleagues for the astounding turquoise lakes of Band-e-Amir, where we had been asked to reorganise tourism and build a visitor centre, we avoided forgotten mines by carefully keeping to the dusty tyre-tracks.

West of Bamyan we walked the spine of a dragon supposedly slain by Hazrat Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet, a haunting volcanic barrage of rock in the shape of a petrified dragon from which emanates mineral tears and mournful, unearthly sounds caused by underground springs, said to be moans of frustration at his mountain imprisonment.

I returned to Bamyan in 2008 to work on the Aga Khan Foundation’s ecotourism project, trying to boost livelihoods for the locals. New Zealand forces were still peacekeeping behind a high wire fence, but security had deteriorated and it was no longer safe to drive the highway from Kabul. My UN aircraft was filled with shadowy characters in checked headgear and bulging armpits, who vanished in haste once we landed amidst the golden fields. Arriving on my flight out of Bamyan was a rare group of intrepid Brits, one of the very last to visit, and led by a veteran journalist.

Looking back it seems naïve, even distasteful, to have been working on tourism in Afghanistan, preparing a national ecotourism strategy, designing national park activities for the lakes of Band-e-Amir, planning fortified farmhouse stays in Bamyan, and recceing trek routes amongst the burned-out tank and artillery skeletons of the Panjshir Valley.

In 2009 and 2011 we brought two ecotourism study tours to learn from Nepal and interact with our industry, including the heroic lady governor of Bamyan, Habiba Sarabi. But in 2005 suicide bombers had murdered more people in London than Afghanistan, and there was still hope that tourism could bring some relief and alternatives for the beleaguered local people. We were unaware of how much worse it would get.

Debate has raged about what is best for the Bamyan Buddhas, how to safeguard, rebuild, repair, restore or revive with 3D laser light projections into the recesses. In Kabul Museum a multi-national team is painstakingly piecing back together 7,000 shattered fragments of Buddhas, smashed with sledgehammers as pagan effigies. “These artefacts don’t just belong to us, they belong to the entire world,” said a stressed-looking conservator in the television interview.

Healing the wounds of the Afghans, putting together the pieces, reassembling the past, is happening just as peace with the Taliban is making some tentative progress.