Green Mosque, Balkh

Listen first. The traffic of Balkh moves slowly here, horse carts beside motorbikes, and somewhere a vendor calls out over a pile of melons. The air is dry and carries fine dust from the plain. Then the eye finds the dome: ribbed, swollen, and covered in a blue that is almost green. Against the pale brick of the town, it looks like a piece of sky set down on the ground.

This building is known to most people as the Green Mosque. Its fuller name points to its real purpose. It is the shrine of Khwaja Abu Nasr Parsa, a respected religious scholar and Sufi teacher of the fifteenth century. A Sufi is a follower of Islam's mystical path, someone who seeks a direct and personal closeness to God. Parsa belonged to the Naqshbandi order, one of the most influential of these spiritual brotherhoods in Central Asia.

The shrine was built in the later fifteenth century, after Parsa's death. That places it in the Timurid era. The Timurids were the dynasty founded by the conqueror Timur, known in the West as Tamerlane. His descendants ruled from cities such as Herat and Samarkand. They are remembered less for war than for what came after it — a long flowering of painting, poetry, astronomy, and above all, architecture in brick and coloured tile.

Look at the dome again. It is not smooth. It is divided into deep vertical ribs, like the segments of a melon. This fluted shape is a signature of Timurid builders. The ribs catch light differently on each side, so the colour shifts as you walk around. In the morning one face glows turquoise. By afternoon the same ribs can look deep and almost cobalt. The dome sits high on a tall drum, which lifts it clear above the rooftops.

Now turn to the entrance. A great arched portal rises at the front, taller than the body of the building behind it. In Persian architecture this kind of framed gateway is called a pishtaq. It works like a stage curtain — it announces the building before you enter. On either side, look for the twisted columns that climb the edges of the arch. Their spiral fluting makes the brick look as if it has been wrung like a cloth.

Here is something many visitors miss. Much of the original tile on the portal has fallen away over the centuries. What remains is the bare brick underneath, the structure the tiles once covered. So in one view you can see two stages of the building at once: the finished surface of blue glaze, and the honey-coloured skeleton beneath it. It is a rare chance to see how these shrines were actually made.

The word Balkh carries enormous weight. In antiquity this was Bactra, capital of the region the Greeks called Bactria. Arab geographers later gave it the title Mother of Cities. Old traditions connect it with Zoroaster, the prophet of the ancient Persian faith. Alexander the Great campaigned here. Buddhist monasteries once stood in the area. Long before this dome was raised, Balkh was already one of the oldest cities in this part of the world.

Balkh also suffered. In 1220 the armies of Genghis Khan took the city, and it was devastated. When the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta passed through in the following century, he described a city largely in ruins. The town that grew back was smaller, and never regained its old size. That makes this shrine important in another way. It belongs to the period when Balkh was slowly being rebuilt, and faith and learning returned to its streets.

One more name belongs to this city. The poet Jalaluddin Rumi was born in Balkh in the early thirteenth century, before his family moved west, shortly ahead of the Mongol invasion. In Afghanistan and Iran he is often called Mawlana Balkhi, the master from Balkh. He is not connected to this shrine directly. But the Sufi spirit that Rumi made famous is the same tradition that Abu Nasr Parsa taught here.

As you look around, notice the open ground and trees near the shrine. This area forms a kind of civic heart for the town. Nearby stands the tomb associated with Rabia Balkhi, a woman poet of the early medieval period. She is honoured across Afghanistan as one of the first poets to write in Persian. Locals tell a tragic story about her love and her death. It is a popular tale, so hold it as legend rather than record.

Shrines like this one are not museums. People come to pray, to ask for blessings, or simply to sit in the shade. You may see families, elderly men in conversation, children running across the paths. Visitors are generally welcomed, but this remains a sacred place. Move quietly, dress modestly, and ask before you photograph anyone. A small greeting goes a long way here.

If you have time, the wider Balkh area holds much more. The ruined mud-brick walls of the ancient city still rise outside the modern town, long and eroded. And a short drive away is the ruined mosque often called Noh Gonbad, meaning nine domes, one of the oldest surviving Islamic buildings in Afghanistan. Its carved stucco is very different from the glazed tiles you see here — softer, older, and made by hand in plaster.

Before you leave, stand back far enough to see the whole building at once — the high portal, the ribbed dome, the brick showing through the gaps. Watch how the colour of the tiles changes as a cloud passes. Listen again to the carts and the voices around you. People have been crossing this square for more than five hundred years, and the dome above you has watched every one of them go by.