Eyewitness: In the shadows of the Buddhas of Bamiyan

The buddhas have watched over the valley for over 1,500 years

By Donna Liu

Over the centuries, the Standing Buddhas of Bamiyan have been at the crossroads of several sweeping moments in history.

From their magnificent carved niches in the sheer cliffs beside one of Afghanistan's few permanent rivers, these statues have witnessed the armies of Alexander the Great come from the West, the Huns from the East, and most recently and devastatingly, the Taleban forces from the end of the Bamiyan valley.

In Afghanistan's rare moments of relative peace, the statues have also seen more mundane traffic. They were once a remote destination for tourists looking to get off the beaten track.

It was as a young backpacker that I saw the Standing Buddhas of Bamiyan, back when Afghanistan was still a kingdom. There were few outsiders there, given the difficulty of access.

From the capital city of Kabul, the only public transport to Bamiyan at the time was in an old creaky bus with no aisle, just wooden planks across the middle. It was safer to ride on top of the bags on the roof, or so it seemed, until the bus left the paved road and started to careen around the curves of the riverbank.

It was one of the most beautiful routes I had traveled in my wanderings through an otherwise harsh and barren land. The river nurtured a narrow belt of greenery on both sides, and the trees in turn cooled the hot desert air.

One approached the statues past the knee-high ruins of the "City of Silence", a town that was never rebuilt after the invading Huns destroyed every home and family. "It's also known as the City of Noise", explained a fellow traveler, because of the screams of the victims on the night it was razed.

Were the eyes of the Buddhas scraped off before or after that event, I wondered. The faces of these stone giants were oddly missing, having been chipped off by earlier soldiers of Islam, who were offended by the representation of the human form.

There was little tourist industry there at that time, but some of the local residents would make some money by boarding the occasional backpackers, and walking them to the feet of the statues. No one was willing to show a visitor the way up to the caves carved into the sides of the cliff, but I could see a curious face or two peer out from inside.

Our host didn't seem to know much about the statues, except that they had always been there, and provided him a living. I can't help but wonder, if he's still there, what he thinks of their imminent destruction.

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