The 1.5 billion euros construction project is a state-of-the-art facility projected to generate 3,000 construction jobs and 3,000 permanent jobs that will not only stimulate the local economy of Athens, but will also have an immediate positive impact on Greece’s economy as well.
In Tajikistan, discover the ruins of a once mighty Silk Road kingdom
16.12.2023 - 17:25 / nationalgeographic.com
At first glance, it doesn’t look like much, just a rectangular meadow in the Pamir foothills of central Tajikistan. But there was a time when this ground reverberated with the thunder of hooves.
Occupying a broad saddle, high above the mighty Panj River, this meadow is believed to be an ancient arena for the Central Asian sport of buzkashi, or dead goat polo. The playing field was a centerpiece of a once sprawling settlement, a political and religious capital inhabited for centuries but since lost to history.
What the whole 15-hectare site amounts to, according to those responsible for its conservation, is the most important archaeological site in Tajikistan. It is a keystone of national efforts to resurrect a distinctly Tajik identity from the country’s fragmented history—and a potential magnet for travelers who are already drawn to the legendary road that snakes along the Panj Valley, the Pamir Highway.
Its rediscovery has drawn comparisons with Machu Picchu in terms of historical importance, if not outright spectacle. Archaeologists have dubbed it Kala-i Kukhna, or Castle Karon, the fortress “located at a height.”
It was 2012 when Yusufsho Yakubov, chief archaeologist at the National Academy of Sciences of Tajikistan, was summoned to Darvoz district to investigate an incongruous mound of rubble above the small village of Ruzvat, in the western outriders of the Pamir Mountains. For centuries a crossroads of trade and empire, Tajikistan is littered with long-abandoned citadels and caravanserai built during the heyday of the Silk Road.
But Yakubov, a veteran scientist, now 87, immedediately thought that they had stumbled upon something extraordinary. “For years the site had endured only as a rumor,” he told me in July, when I met him in Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s capital. “I knew it was a special place within an hour of being there.”
As Yakubov’s team went to work on the mound, they began to unearth an intact building, around 20 feet square, its mud-brick walls topped with a dome. Closer inspection led Yakubov to conclude that it was a “fire temple,” which once would have sheltered an eternal flame, a relic of the Zoroastrian religion that spread out of Persia, modern-day Iran, with the rise of the Achaemenid Empire in the sixth century B.C.
Other discoveries soon followed. Archaic mausoleums dotted the surrounding hills. The excavation of a suspected water temple and observatory, alongside the remnants of a substantial defensive wall, augmented Yakubov’s supposition that Karon may have been a place of special ceremonial prestige. Evidence of winemaking and gold processing pointed to a once thriving economy. Coins found in the vicinity of the fire temple date back to the second century A.D.
(Some of the
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