Traveling to the city of Herat, a large and ancient castle will attract attention. The castle, which is attributed to Alexander the Great and is known as the Citadel of Herat or the ” Qala Ikhtiaruddin”, is a very valuable ancient monument. This historic site has been destroyed several times by civil war and natural disasters, but has been rebuilt by a number of institutions.
The historical Herat Citadel has two parts, west and east. The harem of kings is located in the eastern part and the lower castle is in the western part of the military base. The area of this historic citadel is 5,000 square meters and has 21 towers.
The lower castle, which is more prosperous than the upper castle, has 105 gutters, all of which are made of pottery and are very basic and strong. The length Qala Ikhtiaruddin is (250) meters and its width in some parts reaches (70) meters. The mosque is another beauty of this historical castle, so that its length is 12 meters from inside and its width is 2.5 and the thickness of the walls is 1.5 meters.
The castle is located on a high hill in the northern part of the city between Qutbichaq and Bardaraniha neighborhoods. Some historians also consider this castle to be a remnant of the city of Artaguana (modern-day Herat), which has been destroyed over time.
One of the reasons why this castle is known as Qala Ikhtiaruddin is that in 705 AH, during the dynasty of Crete, a person named King Fakhreddin rebuilt the castle and thanks to the services of Ikhtiaruddin who helped in this way, this castle Named after him. This historical place, when Amir Timur Gurkhani conquered Herat in 785 AH, created a distance between the castle wall and the main wall of the city to protect this building from existing threats. After that, Shahrokh Mirza Teymouri in 818 AH ordered to build a fence of baked clay, stone and lime. He turned this building into his cultural and military center.
Before Alexander crossed the Hindu Kush, he marched from Balkh to Herat and stayed in and around the city for two years. “When Alexander was heading south, he came to an area where there was a city called Herat, and he built a city called Alexandria in that area, and there were useless soldiers and merchants living there,” says Harold Lamp, an American writer. He built a wall around the city to be a temporary means of defending the city. The main purpose of building this fortress was to protect the military from a possible revolt of the people of the city against the domination of the Macedonians.
Qala Ikhtiaruddin has different galleries, which have three galleries in the north of the castle, one gallery in the south, one gallery in the southwest, two galleries in the west and another in the east.
Inside the monument is the National Museum of Afghanistan, one of Afghanistan’s four provincial museums open to the public. Out of 1100 historical monuments from Herat, about 250 of them are exhibited in this historical monument.
The works kept in this museum include works from the periods of Ghaznavids, Ghorians, Malukuk Crete, Safavids and Timurids. Most of these works are made of stone, pottery, metal, tiles and wood, which come in various forms such as household utensils, animal sculptures, coins, weapons of war and ornaments. This museum was founded in 1303 AH during the reign of Amanullah Khan inside Ikhtiaruddin Castle, which was repeatedly robbed by thieves.
According to the Herat Department of Information and Culture, about 150 rare statues of the museum were broken by axes during the Taliban era. Many of these artifacts date back to the 10th and 13th centuries, when Herat was the center of politics and culture. Pottery, metal objects, tombstone of Behzad, the great Persian painter, and manuscripts are among these works.
Arif Usmanov, an Afghan historian, wrote his memoirs about Herat, which were published in the Anis newspaper, No. 193-206, after visiting the Ikhtiaruddin Fortress in 1347 AH. “It would not be an exaggeration to say that each Herat stone is a separate history. Every stone of this proud land speaks to you in the language of the present and tells legends about the past of this land. Only one condition is necessary to understand this state, and that is that your heart should be full of the feeling of love and affection for the life and its beauties. Feel the love and affection for the poets and forerunners of science and art who have left their art and talent for the future. Only then, these stones, which have heard the footsteps of the past, come to tell you the stories.”
