A Call to Save a 12th-Century Minaret, Heard Far and Wide

JAM, Afghanistan — It is the place that launched a thousand postcards, back in the day when tourists still came in any numbers to Afghanistan: the Minaret of Jam.

Even then, few ever actually saw it, tucked into a gorge 12 hours of rough jeep track from anywhere, in a part of the country notorious for its brigandry, Ghor Province in the west-central highlands.

Now, that road passes through Taliban territory as well, and reaching it has become even harder. The track ends at Jam, and in spring and summer the river is too high to cross to the side where the minaret is.

Officials from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization were finally able to revisit the site on Nov. 18, for the first time since 2006. President Ashraf Ghani ordered his military to take a team of experts and check out reports that the minaret, completed more than a century before the similarly Leaning Tower of Pisa, was tilting more perilously than ever.

“I think it’s the very first historical monument of Afghanistan, with an importance far beyond the borders of Afghanistan,” said Tarcis Stevens, a Belgian conservation architect on assignment for Unesco who dropped everything on a few days’ notice and headed to visit the minaret last week. “It’s 800 years old and still looks like it was built yesterday.”

Except, that is, for that tilt, which a recent Afghan report warned was so serious that the minaret was in imminent danger of collapse. Mr. Stevens brought in laser instruments to see how much it had moved since 2006 and 2002, his two previous visits.

The minaret, dating from 1194, is an architectural wonder.

It is built entirely from brick, the second-tallest such tower in the world, and covered in elaborate geometric raised-relief designs and turquoise ceramic inscriptions. From the outside, it appears to have the structure of a telescope, its four staged columns tucked inside one another and rising to 213 feet.

Inside is another wonder: a pair of entwined staircases forming a double helix, similar to that of a DNA molecule. It is a design that predated similar constructions in European towers during the Renaissance, hundreds of years later.

The Minaret of Jam is one of only two Unesco World Heritage sites in Afghanistan. The other is the Bamian Valley, famed for the giant Buddha statues that were largely destroyed by the Taliban.

By some accounts, the minaret was lost to history until a British aircraft flew over the gorge in the late 1950s and saw the long shadow it cast. Now, preservationists say that allowing its fall would be a cultural catastrophe.

Jam is the only major monument remaining from the civilization of the Ghurids, which ruled a 12th-century empire stretching from Iran to Bengal, with its capital in the rugged mountains of Ghor: then, as today, one of Afghanistan’s least accessible places.  Read More at NYTimes