JBO'C's Historical Reference

Kelat-i-Naderi Iran

From Curzon's Persia and the Persia Question:

"October 19. - Before I left the neighborhood I determined to make one more effort to see the interior of Kelat. I knew from MacGregor's book that, besides the two main entrances of climb the Argawan Shah and Nafta, there were other pathways Wtt11 by which it could be entered ; and at Ab-i-Garm a hunter was found who said that he knew one of these very well, but was afraid to conduct me himself. He had a nephew, however, who would act as his substitute, and would appear in the morning. I need hardly say that at the appointed hour the nephew was not forthcoming. That my presence in the vicinity of Kelat was beginning to be regarded with some suspicion was evident both from this and from an incident which occurred that evening. As I was discussing plans in the mud hovel with Ramzan AH and Gregory, I heard a scratching in the roof overhead, and, looking up, detected a man, who, it appeared, had come from Kelat, with his ear to a hole in the rafters, eaves-dropping. As no guide was procurable, I decided to go without one. I had noticed in riding down the valley to Kelat that there was one place where the otherwise unbroken parapet of the southern wall dipped, and formed a V-shaped indentation, which seemed to be accessible from below by one of the sloping natural buttresses that swell up against it from the plain. Any future visitor to Kelat who has read this description will not fail to recognize the spot, about halfway down the valley. I was called at 3.30 A.m., the mules were laden, and we all moved out of Issurcha at 4.30 on a black cold morning1. Sending the camp on to Vardeh from the Derbend-i-Jaur, I rode down the valley for the last time, and leaving my horse at the foot of the hills began the climb. It did not take long to mount the stony skirts, though the slope was very steep; and I easily arrived below the craggy battlements. Here the rock, the natural conformation of which is in wavy horizontal bands, parallel with the

summit, had been artificially scarped by some previous occupant, no doubt by Nadir Shah, so as to form a sort of rocky ledge or pathway running along the face, and defended at intervals by ruined circular towers. There were two such rocky ledges, one about thirty feet above the other. I scrambled on to the lower and pursued it as far as the V-shaped gap. There were only about thirty feet of rock above me; and it was to be climbed. But the face of the rock was very steep and smooth ; I was alone, and though I could have scrambled up it was the kind of place that would have been very awkward to come down from again. Accordingly I resigned the attempt. With the aid of a friend and a rope it could easily have been managed, but from what I know of the interior of Kelat I doubt whether the panorama afforded from the top of the wall would be as striking as might be expected from its external configuration.

On my way back, however, I climbed the highest mountain in the neighborhood, the name of which I do not know, but whose   elevation is far higher than the perimeter of Kelat; and . from there my ambitions were so far and unexpectedly realized that, though I could not see the interior level of Kelat. the angle of vision being too obtuse, I could trace the entire circuit of its walls from east to west on both sides; the southern wall, which I had attempted to climb, appearing from the height mi which I stood to be the lower of the two, and the summit of the north wall rising above it on the further side. From this point I could follow, without difficulty, the whole southern rampart, nearly twenty miles in a straight line, running as regularly as though it had been built by design, and scarped and scarred along its vertical sides down to the point where the buttress-slopes shelved away to the valley. If in their war with Olympian Zeus the Titans had ever had occasion to build for themselves an unassailable retreat, such might well have been the mountain fortress that they would have fared. I made a sketch from this point of the entire circumference, which is reproduced on the next page.1 The mountains in the foreground are the range that separate the valley of Issurcha from the valley that leads down to Argawan Shah's gate.

And now, having related with so much minuteness what I did. I propose to describe from a variety of sources, some of which

1 Though my own sketch is poor enough, I cannot say that I think at all an adequate or faithful idea of Kelat is given by the drawings of Sir C. MacGregor.

have not been accessible to the public, what I did not see, in order that my readers may be able to form an accurate idea of Kelat-i-Nadiri as it is at the present moment. They already have gathered that, though literally translated and commonly called the Fort of Nadir Shah, it is not a fort at all in the accepted sense of the term; consisting as it does of a mountain plateau, with a mean elevation of 2,500 feet above the sea, intersected by deep gullies and ravines, some twenty miles in total length by from five to seven in breadth; and only so far resembling a fortress that this vast extent of ground, comprising a probable area of 150 square miles, is surrounded as with a ring fence by a mighty natural rampart enclosing it from end to end with a cliff- wall of naked and vertical rock, 700 to 1,000 feet in sheer height above the valley bottom. From early times the extraordinary character of the place, which must have resulted from some abnormal convulsion of nature, impressed itself upon the imagination of the neighboring peoples; and Iranian legend localizes here one of the mythical combats between the hero Rustam and the alien forces of Turan under Afrasiab, who, expelled from Kelat by the victorious hosts of Iran, fell back upon the Oxus, where they sustained a final and crushing defeat. Here too, according to the Shah Nameh of Firdausi, settled Ferud, the brother of Kai Khosru, and here he was attacked and slain by Tus. The inscription to which I have alluded proves that as a defensible and defended retreat it was known to the Mongol successors of Genghis Khan. Timur is said to have possessed himself of it by stratagem.

But it was not till the times of Nadir Shah that full use was made of its invaluable natural gifts. Returning from India, laden with the spoils of conquered kingdoms and with the rifled treasures of the Great Mogul, he saw in Kelat, with which he must have been familiar from childhood,1 the ideal storehouse where this vast wealth could be deposited, and also an invulnerable place of arms. Accordingly, he constructed powerful fortifications at all the entrances, placed watch-towers on every peak and point of vantage, artificially scarped the rocky battlements both within and without, in order to render them still more impossible of access, built himself a residence on a plateau in the interior (which it is said he rarely occupied), and provided for a supply of

1. 'Nadir Shah was born in a tent near Mohammedabad, the capital of the neighboring district of Deregez.

good water by excavating large tanks and bringing in fresh supplies by an aqueduct from the exterior.

I have only come across one description of Kelat as it was in the days of Nadir Shah, by a traveler who had evidently been there Basil himself and had not trusted merely to hearsay. This

Batatzes occurs in the narrative of one Basil Batatzes. a Greek merchant who traveled far and wide in Persia and Central Asia at the beginning of the eighteenth century, penetrating to Khiva and Bokhara and visiting Nadir Shah at Meshed. His diary, written in quaint but very intelligible Greek,1 appears to have been quite unknown to the historians who from oral evidence compiled such erroneous descriptions of Kelat in the early part of the present century,2 and diffused an altogether false impression of the place that remained uncorrected till the visit of Baker and Gill in 1873. Returning from Bokhara to Meshed in 1728, Batatzes came byway of Kelat, to which he devotes forty lines of his diary (780-822). The mountains here rise, he says, to a great and inaccessible height, and the place is surrounded, as it were, by a mighty wall, which is not only barren and treeless but is like as though made of marble- or of brass. The circuit thereof is forty or fifty stadia [this is one of his few mistakes], and there are two entrances O7ily, and those by means of zigzag approaches. One might say that the mountains had been rent asunder by an earthquake to form these entrances, where there is barely space for three horsemen or footmen to pass. Of the interior of Kelat (which was then under Nadir's fostering- care, very different from what it is now) he will only say that it contains all that a man can want in the way of natural delights, and that it is self-sufficing and could sustain itself without ever bringing in aught from the outside. He also speaks of it as the intended treasure house of Nadir Shah.

1 It has been edited by M. Ch. Schefer in Noureax Melanges Orientaux (one of the Publicationst de V Ecole des Languet Orientales Vivantes), Paris, 1886>. Basil Batatzes, or Basile Vatace, as his French editor calls him, also wrote a biography of Nadir Shah, which has disappeared.

* For instance, Malcolm, using Kinneir as his authority, thus describes the place: 'The fort of Killaat is situated about thirty miles north-east of Meshed. It is upon a very high hill, only accessible by two narrow paths. An ascent of six or seven miles terminates in a plain about twelve miles in circumference, watered by several fine streams, and covered with verdure and cultivation. A second ascent by a route of ten or eleven miles leads to another plain of greater elevation but of equal richness.' -  History of Persia, vol. i. cap. iii., vol. ii. cap. xv.

After the assassination of the latter in 1747, Kelat passed into tie hands of the present Khan's family, who have held it ever since, along with the Atek or slopes extending to the Turkmen desert below, in nominal vassaldom to Persia, but with occasional assertions of independence which have more than once led to the dispatch of punitive expeditions from Meshed. It has indeed been the habit to keep the head of the family as a hostage at Meshed, in order to guarantee the good behavior of his Iocum tenens at Kelat. Since the conquest of the Atek by Russia in 1881, and the subsequent delimitation of the Russo-Persian frontier in these parts by agreement between the two powers, the greater part of the external properties of Kelat, such as Abiverd (now Kaka), Mehna, Chardeh (now Dushak), and Chacha - the villages, in fact, which are situated at the northern base of the range -  have passed into Russian hands; and, as I shall show later on, the new-comers are gradually creeping further and further up the slopes towards the crest, till they will ultimately reach Kelat itself.

The loss both of possessions and of prestige thus involved has co-operated with the centralizing policy so vigorously pursued by Nasr-ed-Din Shah to reduce Kelat to thorough subordination; and the present Khan, Hajji Abul Fath Khan, would not dream of the rebellious vagaries of his predecessors. Kelat is garrisoned by the Persian Government, by a wing of one of the infantry regiments stationed at Meshed, there being a nominal force of 500 serbaz in the valley, and two guns of the horse artillery. From what 1 saw at the Derbend-i-Argawan Shah, I cannot think that anything like this effective strength is maintained, any more than the conditions of service which promise relief at the end of three months are observed. Though the place has enormous natural strength, I should think that with the present ragged and scattered garrison it might be ' rushed ' any day; while the defenses are not such as would stand for ten minutes against modern artillery.

It appears indeed that the military value of Kelat (in its present condition) to Persia is very small; nor, if acquired by Russia, can I see that its value to her would be very great. No future time of conqueror is likely to wish to use Kelat for Nadir's purpose - viz. as a fortified treasure-house; nor would any modern tactician, I imagine, contemplate the fortification of an enclosure over sixty miles in circumference. The real value of Kelat is as a basis of operations and starting point for offensive movements against Transcaspia. Well guarded at the entrances and held by a strong garrison, it might have been made, and might still become, a veritable thorn in the side of an enemy stationed in the Atek below. A hostile force quartered here might, for instance, descend without warning and with overwhelming strength upon the Transcaspian Railway, and cut the Russian line of communication with the Caspian. But Persia is not the power to do anything one half so heroic; and Nadir's fortress is in the highest degree unlikely ever to be made a sally-port against. Should the Russians take Kelat, which they appear to be excessively anxious to do, the gain to them in prestige would be considerable; for ever since Nadir's days it has been looked upon as the principal military outpost of Khorasan. They would also acquire what might be made a suitable depot for stores, and arsenal for a limited number of troops (neither the water nor the grain supply would sustain many), and there would be the decided negative advantage of preventing a position so formidable in the hands of an enemy from falling into an enemy's hands. But as an offensive measure against Khorasan I do not see that they would profit thereby, as other and far simpler ways are open to them of reaching Meshed, and as no modern army would trust itself to the awful denies that extend for quite forty miles between the two places. In other words, the offensive eye of Kelat, so to speak, looks northward not southward; and, the march of power being in the latter direction, it is unlikely that we shall again see it utilized as a place of arms.

So much for the military value of Kelat-i-Nadiri. Let me now say something about its interior features. How little was known Its five about it before the visits of Baker and MacGregor may be gates illustrated by the scanty description furnished from hear

say by Fraser, who doubled both its length and breadth.1 Entrance to the interior is gained by one of five gates, of which the two principal are Argawan Shah on the south and Nafta on the north. The three others are Kushtani on the south-east, Chubast on the west, and Dehcha on the north-west. All of these gates are said to be fortified and defended by troops; of the two main entrances it is undoubtedly true. There are also several footpaths (it is said 1 Vide Journey into Khorasan, Appendix B (1).

nine) by which it can l>e entered; and I doubt not that in that large circumference shepherds must have discovered goat-tracks by which approach, though difficult, is feasible. Nevertheless, the character, no less than the paucity of the acknowledged entrances, which are in each case through easily barred denies, confirms the general opinion which I have expressed as to the phenomenal nature of this mountain stronghold.

The. inhabitants are Turks chiefly of the Jallayer and Benjat tribes, with a few Arab and Kurdish families as well. Their total number does not exceed 1,000. They are to be found in two villages, situated in the valley by which the stream which I followed enters and traverses Kelat, and in six hamlets upon the uplands or higher elevations. Of the two main villages, I saw that of Argawan Shah, clustered upon either side of the gorge, at a short distance within the gate of the same name. The other, Giuk Gumbaz (i.e. ' Vault of Heaven' in Turkish) or Ja Gambaz, locally contracted into Gugumaz, is a little over two miles down the valley from the same entrance, and is the spot to which I had twice dispatched Shukurullah to interview the Khan and to send the telegram. Here is a curious circular tower of red sandstone, with fluted half-columns on the outer surface, rising from a big octagonal substructure. It is called Makber-i-Nadiri, having been built (for what purpose does not appear clear) by that king, and is now used as a residence by the Khan.1 From Gugumaz the river continues to run for six miles at the bottom of the same valley, which intersects Kelat from south to north, and deepens into a rocky gorge, until upon reaching the northern wall it passes out through a cleft not unlike that of Argawan Shah, similarly fortified, garrisoned, and closed by a wall pierced with arches across the bed of the stream. The latter, emerging from the defile, makes its way down through the lower ranges, and ultimately irrigates the cornfields of Dushak.

In addition to Nadir's tower at Gugumaz, there are other but quite inconsiderable relics of that king's occupation. To the north- Remains of west of the village, upon an elevated open plateau, are the ruins of what purports to be his palace, and is called Imaret-i-Nadiri, the largest remains being those of an enclosure, called the Diwan-Khaneh, twenty yards square. Beyond this,

1 There is an illustration of it in MacGregor's Journey through Khorasan, vol. ii. p. 50.

again, most travelers have been taken up the summit of the Kuli Khisht, which is 1,500. feet above the level of the plateau and 4,000 feet above the sea ; but than which MacGregor was of opinion that finer views are afforded by other elevations. The water tanks and conduit constructed by Nadir have already been mentioned.

O'Donovan compared Kelat with the Happy Valley of Rasselas; but he would probably have shifted his simile had he been condemned to reside for a time within its walls. ' Of the and water total inside area, only a small portion is under cultivation, the water supply consisting merely of the stream so often mentioned and of five small springs. This scarcity renders the support either of a large population or of a powerful garrison impossible, except by supplies brought from the outside. Cultivation in the interior is limited to two areas, the river valley and the uplands. In the former, along the banks of the stream and in the flat spaces, rice, cotton, lucerne, vines, melons, and cucumbers flourish under the persuasive influence of water. On the higher ground, which rises to 1,000 and even 1,500 feet above the valley bottom, are grown barley and wheat. There are few trees or shrubs inside Kelat; and the grass cannot be remarkable either in quantity or quality, seeing that the inhabitants frequently send their flocks outside to graze. To represent the place, therefore, as an oasis is a misnomer."
Persia and the Persian Question By The Hon. George N. Curzon, M.P.  London: Longmans, Green, And Co. and New York : 15 East 16th Street  1892