[A steady spate of ever-worsening suicide bombings, including a recent one close to Chicken Street; a lack of faith in a corrupt police force; and rampant crime have done to Chicken Street what a Russian invasion, decades of civil war and even urban combat could not do — driven shoppers away.]
By Rod Nordland
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At Kabul Leather on
Chicken Street, furs and animal skins are for sale.
Credit Erin Trieb for The
New York Times
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KABUL,
Afghanistan — Every big city has at least
one street that’s a must-see for visitors: King’s Road in London, Stary Arbat
in Moscow, Paseo del Prado in Madrid, Via Condotti in Rome.
Kabul has Chicken Street.
Only two blocks long, this shabby lane full of
competing aromas, lined with shops selling jewelry, antiques, knickknacks,
artworks and, especially, Oriental rugs, has been a magnet for generations of
foreign visitors looking for Afghan exotica. For decades, about the only thing
missing has been chickens.
Now it is also missing foreigners.
Customers of any sort are thin on the ground.
Most of the scores of shops have zero patrons at any given moment; one is
unusual, two is a crowd.
But foreign visitors, once Chicken Street’s
mainstay, are so rare that their arrival creates a sensation. On some days it’s
so bad, even the beggars don’t bother to come to work, and the touts scarcely
stir from their stoops.
As with so much in Kabul today, the security
situation is to blame.
A steady spate of ever-worsening suicide
bombings, including a recent one close to Chicken Street; a lack of faith in a
corrupt police force; and rampant crime have done to Chicken Street what a
Russian invasion, decades of civil war and even urban combat could not do —
driven shoppers away.
Embassies and international organizations, most
aid groups and foreign contractors have banned their employees from shopping
there, depriving Chicken Street of that precious commodity — customers who
bargain poorly and pay dearly.
Herat Carpets is one of the street’s most
successful rug merchants, but April 13 was the last day in Afghanistan for the
owner, Wahid Abdullah. He is moving his main business to Istanbul. “Security”
was his one-word explanation.
From the outside, Herat Carpets looks like a
tiny, hole-in-the-wall place, but deep in the back is a carpet-lined staircase,
leading to a carpet-walled corridor, leading to a series of windowless rooms
piled with stacks nearly to the ceiling of Afghan handmade rugs of every
description.
Mr. Abdullah serves his customers green tea on
an antique coffee table (old maple inlaid with hammered metals of several
types), loaded with trays of pistachios, Afghan sweets, native raisins (long
and plump) and local almonds (narrow and pointy).
Then he lays out carpets, pointing out the
abrash on one — the color shift where a hand weaver had to dye a new batch of
yarn — or the rare shade of yellow given by dye from the weld flower on another,
or the hard-to-find imperfection on a third.
Only God can be perfect, he said, so each
Afghan rug has a mistake woven into the pattern.
Mr. Abdullah does not sell customers, he
seduces them. On Friday evenings, after work hours, he used to invite over a
group of friends to share a bottle of wine in his colorful inner sanctum
upstairs.
“The way some men might talk about beautiful
women, we would discuss the beauty of carpets,” he said.
Take the universal mystery of the badamcha
design, Mr. Abdullah said. Known in the West as paisley, it is a motif found in
rugs throughout the world. He excitedly pointed out a rug whose pattern had
paisleys curled inside larger paisleys: “Pregnant paisley!”
Those days are over. Some of his friends left,
as he is now doing; others are prevented from venturing out by security
concerns. “We are all missing each other and those times,” he said.
In some ways, Chicken Street hasn’t changed.
The range of merchandise remains eclectic, and sometimes disturbing. Snow
leopard pelt? Hajji Abdul Razzaq showed off one in a padlocked storeroom under
his shop, Kabul Leather — only $500. Wolf? $200.
“No problem with customs,” he insisted. He also
had for sale a stuffed cheetah, which he claimed had come from Kandahar
(Afghanistan, not Africa), an unlikely extension of its known range. Yes,
problem with customs.
Elsewhere, there are flintlock rifles and camel
saddlebags; kilims and suzanis; chain mail shirts and Tartar helmets. A
19th-century British ship’s sextant and brass telescope are offered for $100
for both, which probably means $50 will do.
“They’re fakes,” the shopkeeper cheerfully
explained. “But real brass.”
Almost anything can be found carved from lapis
lazuli, a semiprecious, deep blue gemstone native to Afghanistan. Globes of the
world, tables, crockery, necklaces of thousands of beads are all typically sold
by their weight in lapis, $41 a pound to those in the know, often no extra
charge for workmanship.
Outside, the mouthwatering smell of kebabs
grilling over charcoal in long metal trays on the sidewalks wafts along the
street, although nowadays it mingles, probably more than ever, with the odor of
raw waste running down open sewers.
When Chicken Street had its greatest boom, in the
years right after the American-led invasion in 2001, enterprising developers
tore down many of the little two-story shops with their corrugated metal
awnings and replaced them with multistoried emporiums, homes to dozens of shops
each. But they didn’t build new sewers.
“The newly rich came, and destroyed Chicken
Street,” Mr. Abdullah said.
That was not what drove Mr. Abdullah to pull up
stakes for Turkey. “In the end, children make the decision,” he said. He
worried constantly about his own being snatched on the way home from school.
“It wasn’t even the bombs so much. Worse than that was the fear of kidnapping.”
Shukrullah Ahmadi, a jeweler, learned the hard
way about that.
He and his brother Noorullah had just bought an
expansive new building on Chicken Street for half a million dollars, complete
with a secret covered passageway in the back, leading to a rug and antique
furniture shop down the street, which they also owned. This way they could run
both shops, popping up in whichever one had patrons.
Kidnappers abducted Noorullah Ahmadi at
gunpoint, then sent Shukrullah Ahmadi a video of his brother being tortured;
they cut off Noorullah’s ear. Shukrullah sold his family’s home to raise the
ransom money. When he met the kidnappers to hand it over, they were in police
uniforms, their faces unmasked.
Shukrullah Ahmadi is still in business, but
more heavily armed, he said, and unlike many of the Chicken Street merchants,
he is not worried about the decline in customers. He still serves foreigners,
often by visiting them in their embassies and offices.
He has many Afghan regulars as well, for stones
ranging from black diamonds to star sapphires, Afghan emeralds (poor quality
but cheap), jade and tourmaline.
“I’m happy about my business, but worried about
security,” he said.
Ahmad Wali Shirzad of LS Leather also has no
plans to stop making leather handbags of camel, goat and calfskin, even though
he said business was about the worst he has ever seen. “It’s almost as bad as
during the Taliban time.” But then again, he added, the Taliban time finally
ended.
Hardly anyone is left on Chicken Street who can
remember when it sold chickens, it was so long ago. Mr. Shirzad’s father,
Atiqullah, started their business in 1975, and recalled a few chicken shops in
those days, when it was a poor neighborhood in the center of the city, but
later tourist booms drove rents up and chickens out.
Some local boosters have recently proposed
changing the name to Antiques Street; the word “antiques” is similar in English
and Dari, the dialect of Persian spoken in Afghanistan.
“That is crazy idea,” said Mr. Ahmadi, in
fluent but slightly fractured English. “Just one street you have any place is
Chicken Street. If you say Antiques Street, it could be anywhere in world.”
Follow Rod Nordland on Twitter: @rodnordland.
Fatima Faizi contributed reporting.
