Panjshir Valley
— — the valley that held when the country did not.
Not only on a wall.
“A long, narrow valley cut by the Panjshir River through the southern Hindu Kush, north of Kabul. The name means Five Lions, for the five legendary brothers said to have held the upper gorge. The valley floor is green with wheat, mulberries and poplars where the river spreads; the walls rise sharply to ridgelines of bare grey stone. Panjshir is best known in the wider world as the home valley of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the commander whose forces held the gorge against successive armies. The emerald veins along the upper river have been worked for centuries. — from the studio
Panjshir Valley, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Panjshir Valley runs roughly 150 kilometres through the southern Hindu Kush, north of Kabul, drained by the Panjshir River on its way to the Shomali Plain. The valley floor sits near 2,200 metres and climbs toward 6,000-metre peaks at the headwaters. It forms the heart of Panjshir Province, one of the smallest Afghan provinces by area, with a predominantly Tajik population of roughly 175,000 concentrated in villages along the river. The single road in follows the gorge from the south; for much of its length the valley is only a few hundred metres wide between the cliffs.
The valley walls are folded metamorphic and igneous rock at the southern edge of the Hindu Kush, and the upper Panjshir has been mined for emeralds since at least the early modern period. The deposits, concentrated in the Khenj district, are among the world's richest in colour intensity, and rough stones from the valley have moved through Peshawar and Jaipur into the international market for decades. The same range, further west, yields the deep blue lapis lazuli that has come out of Badakhshan for more than six thousand years. The river itself runs grey-green with glacial sediment through the warmer months.
Panjshir held against the Soviet Army through the 1980s and against the Taliban through the 1990s under the command of Ahmad Shah Massoud, born in the valley in 1953 and assassinated two days before the September 11 attacks in 2001. His tomb stands on a hill above Bazarak, the provincial capital, looking down the valley. The Taliban took the province in September 2021 after the fall of Kabul, and access for outside visitors has been very limited since. The villages along the river — Rokha, Bazarak, Anaba, Khenj — keep the long memory of the valley.