Place · royal fort · Pakistan
Baltit Fort, Hunza
The seat of the Mirs of Hunza for some seven hundred years, standing on a spur above Karimabad with the Hunza valley and the Karakoram trade road below it. The building is Tibetan in construction — dry stone with timber cribbage laced through it against earthquakes, flat roofs, small high windows — and tradition holds that Balti craftsmen came with a princess married into Hunza from Baltistan and built it. It was abandoned in 1945 when the Mir moved downhill.
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 36.326, 74.670
Worth knowing
The Aga Khan Trust for Culture restored it between 1990 and 1996 and it opened as a museum, which made a Karakoram fort the first conservation project in the region to be done to an international standard rather than rebuilt in cement.
Connections (4)
- In the same set asShigar Fort (Fong Khar)
Baltit, Shigar, Altit and Khaplu are the Karakoram palace-forts, and they are one building tradition: dry stone with timber cribbage laced horizontally through the walls against earthquakes, flat roofs, carved wooden pillars and lintels in a vocabulary that comes from Kashmir by way of Buddhist Baltistan. Baltit is the Hunza Mirs' and the oldest; Shigar is the Amacha rajas' of the Baltoro valley. All were restored by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture between 1990 and 2011, which is why any of them still stand.
- Shared sacred geographyTurtuk
Turtuk and Hunza are both Balti, and the line of control runs between them. Turtuk was part of Baltistan until 1971, when India took it in the war, so its people are Balti-speaking Nurbakhshi Muslims now living in Ladakh with relatives on the other side; Baltit Fort at Karimabad is the Hunza Mirs' seat on the Pakistani side of the same cultural region. The Balti language, the timber-and-stone building, the apricot orchards and the polo are continuous across a border that families are not.
- AnalogueShandur Pass
Polo in the western Himalaya is not the game that left it. The free-style version played on the Shandur between Chitral and Gilgit, and in the Hunza and Baltistan valleys under forts like Baltit, has effectively no rules beyond not striking another rider deliberately: no umpire, no substitutes, play from the throw-in. This is closer to the mounted training exercise the sport originally was than anything codified in Calcutta in the 1860s and exported to England, which is the version the rest of the world plays.
- Site withinHunza
Baltit Fort sits within the Hunza Valley in the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan, 100 kilometres north of Gilgit. The 700-year-old Mir of Hunza's fort at Karimabad commands the Hunza Valley from an outcrop above Baltit village and served as the Hunza royal residence from the 13-century Mir dynasty until the 1945 move to a modern residence. The 1992 Aga Khan Trust for Culture restoration preserved the fort as the Baltit Fort Museum, Hunza's chief heritage landmark.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Baltit Fort”. Aga Khan Trust for Culture, Baltit Fort conservation reports (1990–96); UNESCO tentative list submission for Baltit Fort (2004).
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