Travel to pakistan
Only a few states can compete with Pakistan in the number and variety of attractions. There is both British colonial architecture and the ruins of ancient civilizations. The north of the country is dotted with mountains 7-8 kilometers high, and the south is washed by the tropical Arabian Sea. Add here a motley mosaic of dozens of ethnic groups, languages and religions - and get one of the most interesting countries on earth. We tell in detail why to go to Pakistan.
Text: Pavlo Morkovkin
To enter Pakistan, one must complete a full course of vaccination (the Russian Sputnik V is recognized). An exception is made only for people under 18 years of age and those for whom vaccination is contraindicated for health reasons.
A PCR test must be done 72 hours before the start of the trip. A certificate with a negative result must be uploaded to the website or Pass Track application and the form printed out. All arrivals take a rapid antigen test paid for by Pakistan.
You can get to Pakistan from Russia and back only with a transfer in another country. Therefore, you may need to get a negative PCR test also on departure - check the airline's rules.
Mughal architecture
Lahore
The Mughal dynasty ruled in South Asia in the 16th-18th centuries and left behind a lot of monumental buildings - everyone knows about the Indian Taj Mahal. A significant part of the Mughal architectural heritage has been preserved in the territory of modern Pakistan. In this sense, the city of Lahore was lucky, which in the 16th Century was the capital of the empire. It is in Lahore and its environs that most of the Mughal objects with a recognizable "Taj Mahal" style are concentrated: white marble domes, high minarets, huge entrance gates and green gardens around the perimeter.
The main historical attraction of the city is the local fort, which is included in the UNESCO heritage list . An impressive fortress, inside the walls of which are mosques, administrative and residential buildings, decorated with paintings, carvings, marble panels and mosaics of mirrors and stones.
Another Lahore UNESCO site is the Shalimar Gardens . Surrounded by a high brick wall, these are three separate terraces - each the size of several football fields - which contain fountains, pools and stuccoed pavilions.
Photo: Shutterstock
On the opposite bank of the Ravi River are several Lahore monuments on a smaller scale: a 17th-century caravanserai and the mausoleums of three Mughal statesmen, one of whom is Emperor Jahangir, father and predecessor of Emperor Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal.
In the city of Shekhupura, 60 kilometers from Lahore, is the 17th-century Hiran Minar complex , which Emperor Jahangir built in the middle of his hunting grounds. Here hunters could rest, and a huge pool the size of ten football fields was used to lure animals out of the forest. One of the buildings - a thirty-meter tower - Jahangir erected in memory of his beloved antelope, the remains of which are buried under the roof.
Monuments of the ancient world
Harappa
Pakistan is a relatively young state. It gained independence in 1947 when the British left the Indian subcontinent. But the history of human civilization on these lands goes back thousands of years. Simultaneously with Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, no less developed Indus civilization existed on the territory of modern Pakistan. It is also called Harappan - after the town of Harappa in the province of Punjab, near which the first settlement of this culture was discovered 100 years ago. Now the excavation site is open to the public, and there is a small museum nearby.
mohenjo-daro
Much more famous is another ancient city of the Harappan civilization - Mohenjo-Daro in the province of Sindh, included in the UNESCO list. This is an archaeological complex, on the territory of which fragments of residential and administrative buildings built of burnt bricks, baths, granaries and even sewers are visible. By the way, here is the oldest toilet known to science - in the houses of Mohenjo-Daro there were special rooms that were connected by a system of drains to a common collector.
Photo: Shutterstock
And in the north of the country along the Karakorum highway there are several points with rock art . Researchers claim that the oldest of them belong to prehistoric times, and the newest - to the first millennium of our era. Previously, in these places there was a route along which pilgrims, preachers, traders and invaders moved between Xinjiang and the plains of modern Pakistan, leaving reminders of themselves on granite rocks. The content of petroglyphs is very diverse: these are inscriptions made by local ancient writing systems, drawings of people, deities, mountain goats, scenes of hunting and battles. The later ones include Buddhist inscriptions and images of stupas.
The first gallery of petroglyphs can be seen if you drive away from the city of Chilas for a kilometer towards China. The second group is located near the Alam Bridge, where the road leaves the Karakoram Highway east towards Skardu. The third place is called the Sacred Rock of Hunza and is located right on the side of the highway opposite Altit Fort.
Photo: Pavlo Morkovkin
Islam
Islam is the state religion of Pakistan, and 96.5% of Pakistanis profess this particular faith. The first Islamic missionaries appeared on the territory of modern Pakistan as early as the 7th century, just a few decades after the emergence of this religion. And in 711, the Arab invaders conquered the lands of Sindh from the Hindu Maharaja, and since then the religion began to spread throughout the territory of the future Islamic republic.
Islam in Pakistan is very heterogeneous. The majority of Muslims are Sunnis, but 10-15% identify themselves as Shiites. There are few offshoots: for example, the Ahmadiyya is a sect that was created at the end of the 19th century in Punjab by a local preacher: its representatives are considered unfaithful even by other Muslims in many countries. In the mountains of Gilgit-Baltistan, ethnic groups live who nominally consider themselves Muslims, but at the same time retain many pre-Islamic traditions, including shamanism.
Photo: Shutterstock
Sufism, a mystical movement whose followers practice ecstatic rituals and believe in the existence of saints who receive knowledge directly from God, has become very widespread in Pakistan. Thanks to this belief, many mausoleums of Sufi preachers were built. Sufi followers consider these tombs to be shrines and visit them to pray and ask the deceased theologian for help. The largest gatherings take place on Urs, the anniversary of the death of a Sufi, which is considered according to the Islamic lunar calendar. Thousands - sometimes hundreds of thousands - of people gather at the mausoleum for prayer. And after the evening prayer, dhamal begins - Sufi ritual dances to drum improvisations. A small dhamal also takes place on ordinary days - on Thursday after sunset.
The largest Sufi shrines in Pakistan are Date Darbar in Lahore, the tomb of the theologian Ali Hujwiri, who lived in the 11th century, and the tomb of a saint known as Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, who lived in the 11th-12th centuries, in the city of Sehwan, Sindh province.
mausoleums
Islamic architecture in Pakistan is no less diverse, and the style of buildings differs depending on the region and era. For medieval architecture, it is best to go to Uch Sharif and Multan. Uch Sharif is a small town that was an important religious and cultural center several centuries ago. The main local attraction is three octagonal mausoleums of the XIV-XVI centuries, about twenty meters high, built of brick and decorated with blue tiles. Two hundred years ago, a flood brought down each of the buildings exactly half way, so that it is very easy to imagine their original appearance from the rest. Multancalled the City of Saints for the abundance of mausoleums of Islamic theologians. The most significant and beautiful are the tombs of Bahauddin Zakariya (XIII century) and Shah Rukn-e Alam (XIV century) in the old city and the mausoleum of Shah Yusuf Gardezi (XII century) a few hundred meters from the first two.
Photo: Pavlo Morkovkin
Mosques
The Amburik and Chakchan mosques in Baltistan were built in the 14th century, when the first Islamic preachers appeared in the mountainous region. These buildings are made in a traditional Himalayan technique, in which alternating layers of stones and wooden beams are used to build a house - this increases the earthquake resistance of the building.
Adjacent to the Lahore Fort is the city's most iconic landmark, the Mughal-era Badshahi Mosque . Its courtyard the size of Red Square can accommodate about one hundred thousand people, making it one of the largest mosques in Pakistan. Red sandstone was used to build the mosque, and the main building is crowned with three huge marble domes. The interior is divided into sections with interesting acoustic effects. For example, in one part of the mosque, the walls and vault resonate with the guttural sounds of speech. In the other, the sound directed to the corner, moving along the arch, will reach the opposite corner of the room, but at the same time it will not be heard literally a couple of meters from the source. In the old city, the Mughal mosques of Wazir Khan, Mariam Zamani Begum and Sunehri are worth visiting.
Of the modern mosques , Masjid-e Tuba in Karachi is interesting. It is a huge dome, which is supported only by walls along the perimeter - without additional supports in the center. From the inside, the vault is decorated with thousands of small mirrors. The Faisal Mosque in Islamabad has become a symbol of the Pakistani capital. It was named after the Saudi king Faisal ibn Abdulaziz al-Saud, who sponsored the construction. The project was developed by a Turkish architect, who decided to use an octagonal roof, reminiscent of a Bedouin tent, instead of the traditional dome for such buildings. According to some sources, the Faisal Mosque can accommodate 300,000 people and is considered one of the largest mosques in the world.
Photo: Pavlo Morkovkin
Buddhism
In the first millennium BC, when Islam did not even exist, Buddhism spread widely in the territory of modern Pakistan. This period left a lot of monuments: from monasteries and stupas to statues and rock bas-reliefs. Some monuments shared the fate of the statues in the Afghan Bamiyan and were destroyed by Islamic fanatics. Others were more fortunate: they were either able to be restored, or they have at least partially survived to this day, despite the merciless time, the efforts of the Taliban and local residents, who disassemble the old buildings into bricks. Now Buddhist pilgrims from East Asia come to these places.
You can find Buddhist artifacts almost throughout Pakistan. Even the ruins of ancient Mohenjo-Daro are crowned with a stupa built by Kushan monks in the 2nd century AD. e. But the northern regions are much more interesting in this sense. The most significant and large-scale places are the UNESCO sites of the Buddhist monastery complex Takht-i-Bakhi , 70 kilometers from Peshawar, and the monuments in Taxila near Islamabad. Takht-i-Bahi was founded at the beginning of the 1st century. n. e., and due to its location on the top of a high hill, it survived during the numerous wars in this area. Today, stupas, a meeting room, meditation rooms, residential and utility rooms, which the monks used until the 7th century, have been preserved on the territory of the complex.
The monuments of Taxila date back to different cultures and historical periods starting from the Neolithic. Of the Buddhist heritage, the Dharmarajika and Jaulian monasteries are best preserved, on the territory of which stupas, high reliefs and Buddha statues have survived.
Photo: Pavlo Morkovkin
Closest to popular hiking trails are the Kargah Buddha near Gilgit and the Buddha Rock at Skardu . The first is a fifteen-meter image of the Buddha, carved on a rock in the 7th century. The second is a large granite stone covered with Buddhist images and texts from the 9th century.
But the largest concentration of Buddhist monuments is in the Swat Valley in the northwest of the country. If you have time and inspiration, then it is worth driving around the local villages and touching the history. The most interesting places here are the archaeological complexes of Butkara I and Butkara III, the Shingardar Stupa and the Jehanabad Buddha.
Most of these monuments belong to the so-called Greco-Buddhism - a combination of ancient Greek culture and local religious traditions. Initially, Buddha Gautama was depicted not as a person, but with the help of symbols: the Bodhi tree, footprints, the wheel of Dharma. In the IV century BC. e. the troops of Alexander the Great reached these places, and with them the European cultural influence, thanks to which the local Buddhas acquired a human appearance.
British colonial architecture
Separate territories of modern Pakistan were under British control for more than a century, so the colonialists managed to leave an impressive architectural heritage here. In some objects, elements of Victorian buildings in England itself are easily recognizable, while others are distinguished by a special Indo-Saracenic style. It used elements of the traditional architecture of Hindustan, primarily the buildings of the Mughal era. Most of the colonial buildings are concentrated in large Pakistani cities: Karachi, Multan, Bahawalpur, Lahore, Peshawar.
Some buildings are still used for their intended purpose: they house local governments, military units or universities, and getting into some of them is not easy. Others have been turned into museums and are therefore open to the public or simply abandoned. For example, almost all Pakistani railway stations were built by the colonialists.
Photo: Pavlo Morkovkin
Pakistan's largest city, Karachi, was a small fishing village when the British arrived in the mid-19th century. Therefore, the colonialists began to intensively erect residential and administrative buildings. Today, in the area of modern M.A. Jinnah Road, quarters of historical buildings have been preserved. In addition to this area in the city, there are other places worth seeing:
Mohatta Palace, which was the residence of a local businessman at the beginning of the last century, and now turned into a museum;
