IshaiyaFreshlySqueezed

Myself and Friend Nawab standing at the entrance to Chicken Street

As I’ve stated in earlier posts, Afghanistan was once famous as a passage from East to West for trading empires.  And Kabul, while an ancient city, was not really historically the center of Afghanistan, until relatively recently.

Kabul used to be a place where livestock and other trading goods were exchanged and stored.  It is my theory that the city was founded where it is because the Kabul River came so close to the mountains in the part of Police District 1 known as “The Lion’s Gate”, that it made a handy place to pen up livestock.  Traders only really needed to put some barriers across the narrow corridor there and they had an instant pen.

Bala Hisar circa 1879 – Photo by John Burke

From there, the city grew along natural patterns based on terrain and socio-cultural pressures. …