Silk Roads Heritage Corridors: Intangible Cultural Heritage Workshop, Bamiyan, Afghanistan

UNESCO and the Government of Afghanistan have recently organized the second capacity-building initiative on the community-based inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) in Afghanistan. Since 2018 UNESCO has been implementing a 3-year project titled "Silk Roads Heritage Corridors in Afghanistan, Central Asia and Iran – International Dimension of the European Year of Cultural Heritage". This workshop on ICH, possible due to the generous support of the European Union, took place between August 19 and 21, at the Gholghola Hotel, in Bamiyan, Afghanistan.

In addition to ICH practitioners from Bamiyan, the workshop included the participation of representatives from NGOs and local universities, national and local government officials, and representatives from the Ministry of Information and Culture (MoIC) from the provinces of Herat and Nangarhar. UNESCO also invited representatives from the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) and Turquoise Mountain (TM) to present during the training. These two organisations have both been active in the field of documentation and share a clear vision for safeguarding ICH in the country, having worked alongside UNESCO in providing support to the MoIC in this field for the past 18 months.

The first workshop on community-based inventory was held in Bamiyan in 2018, and the initial documentation of three ICH elements took place including barack (felt weaving), the tavakhana (a technique where cooking pits are also used to heat living chambers within a home), and the mihrab (the traditional system through which water is distributed across agricultural fields).

During the 2019 workshop, initial documentation was carried out on two new ICH elements: the Dambura, a musical tradition shared between Hazara and Uzbek groups, preeminent in the Bamiyan region; and kolokhi, a traditional earth cooking technique used especially during the potato harvest.

For the past few years, UNESCO has worked closely with the Government of Afghanistan and local partners such as AKTC and TM, to implement the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. It is expected that following the last capacity-building initiatives on community-based inventory and documentation, a new workshop will be held in early 2020 to initiate the process of nominating some of the country’s most significant intangible cultural heritage to both the Representative List of the ICH of Humanity and the List of ICH in Need of Urgent Safeguarding.

More info: UNESCO Almaty Page

See also:

Silk Roads Heritage Corridors: Restoration of Sites of Silk Roads Exchange

Preservation of the Traditional Craftsmanship of the Silk Roads: Kyrgyz felt carpets