Ann Marlowe

There aren’t many blank spots left on the map that run half a degree of latitude wide, even in Afghanistan. Nimroz Province, a Tennessee-sized chunk of prairie and desert that’s home to 149,000 Afghans, is one such area.

I set out with a photographer friend, John Murphy, to satisfy a craving to see the massive centuries-old ruins of Shahr-i-Gholghola, a city that must once have covered the same area as Manhattan. An American traveling from Kandahar to Nimroz had seen them from his car and e-mailed me his photos; they bore out the description of Nancy Hatch Dupree, the dean of Afghan archaeology, as “the greatest assemblage of 15th-century A.D. architecture anywhere in the Middle East.” Abandoned around 1407 to the ravages of summer sandstorms and winter flash flooding from the nearby Helmand River, the site has not been explored since a Smithsonian Institution expedition left in 1976. (more…)

By ANN MARLOWE

TURIN, Italy — There’s a general, and luckily false, belief that the years of war have wiped out Afghanistan’s artistic heritage. Many of the greatest objects from the Kabul Museum survived the years of war and are part of “I Tesori Ritrovati,” a revelatory show now in Turin.

Many of the 220 items in this exhibit were hidden for decades in the vaults of the Presidential Palace in Kabul, while others are recent finds; it’s highly unlikely you have seen any of them before. The current show began its tour in December at Paris’s Musee Guimet, which also lent a few objects to the show, and will travel to Bonn, Amsterdam and the U.S. before returning to exhibition in Kabul for the first time in some thirty years.

In Turin, you enter the exhibit by descending from the street level to the remains of the city’s Roman theater. The installation in a series of relatively small rooms in the vaulted brick basement of the 1899 Manica Nuovo di Palazzo Royale, allows for an intimate experience of the mainly small-scale art. (more…)