Istalif

Istalif is a village of potters on a hillside above the Shomali plain an hour north-west of Kabul, and it has been making the same turquoise-glazed ware for centuries from clay dug on the slope and a copper glaze fired in wood kilns. Babur wrote about the orchards here and called the place the best of the villages around his capital. It was burned by a British column in 1842 and again by the Taliban in 1998, and both times the potters came back. Terraced gardens of mulberry and vine step down below the workshops. The name is read locally as the place of grapes, from the Greek word for them.