Place · offshore island & shrine · Pakistan
Astola Island (Haft Talār)
Pakistan's largest offshore island, about seven kilometres of uninhabited rock and scrub forty kilometres out from the Makran coast, called Haft Talār in Balochi for its seven terraces. It carries the ruin of a shrine to Kali that Hindu fishermen and pilgrims visited, and it is a nesting beach for green and hawksbill turtles, which is why it became Pakistan's first Marine Protected Area in 2017. Arrian's account of Nearchus's voyage past this coast in 325 BCE names an island the sailors feared.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered
- Location
- 25.122, 63.847
Worth knowing
Arrian says the Greeks were told a nereid lived on an island here and turned men into fish, and that Nearchus landed to disprove it — which makes Astola a candidate for the first place on the Pakistani coast to be visited specifically in order to debunk something.
The identification of Arrian's Nosala with Astola is a scholarly conjecture, not established.
Connections (2)
- Route adjacencyGwadar
Astola lies about forty kilometres off the coast between Pasni and Gwadar, on the sea road that has run this shore since the Bronze Age. Nearchus took Alexander's fleet along it in 325 BCE and Arrian records the sailors' fear of an island here; the Periplus and the Arab geographers name the same anchorages. The island is uninhabited because there is no fresh water on it, which is precisely why it stayed a landmark and a fishing camp rather than becoming a port like the mainland harbours either side of it.
- Pitha network withHinglāj Mātā
Two Hindu shrines on the most improbable coast in the subcontinent. Hinglāj Mātā sits in a cave in a Makran gorge and draws the largest Hindu pilgrimage in Pakistan each April, counted among the Shakta pithas. Astola, forty kilometres out to sea, carries the ruin of a shrine to Kali that fishermen visited by boat. Both survive in a province that is overwhelmingly Muslim and thinly populated, and both survive for the same reason: they are too remote for anyone to have bothered about them.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Astola Island”. Arrian, Indica, on Nearchus's voyage; IUCN and Government of Balochistan Marine Protected Area notification, 2017.
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