Darul Aman Palace

The name means abode of peace, which is a hard thing for this building to have been called.

It went up in the 1920s as part of King Amanullah Khan's attempt to modernise Afghanistan, on the plain southwest of Kabul, at the end of a road driven straight toward it. The work was led by the German engineer Walter Harten with a team of German architects, and it was finished in 1927. It was among the first buildings in the country with central heating and running water, and it was meant to sit alongside a new parliament as the centre of a new capital.

That plan did not survive its own decade. Amanullah was forced out in 1929 and the palace never took up the role it was built for. It burned, was repaired, served as a ministry and a military headquarters, and then took the worst of it during the civil war of the 1990s, when it was shelled into a roofless shell and left standing empty for more than twenty years. Photographs from that period are the ones most people know: a neoclassical facade with the sky showing through the windows.

It was rebuilt. Work began in 2016 on a restoration budgeted around twenty million dollars, and the bulk of it was finished for 19 August 2019, the hundredth anniversary of Afghan independence.

This is not a place to plan a visit to. Afghanistan carries the strongest travel warnings issued by most governments, and it is on the map here as a building with a documented history rather than as a destination.