I was supposedto visit this in July but I did nt. I managed to go Astor and Deosai but not Skardu.
Oh well some place saved for my next summer Pakistan trip which will most likely be in 2012 insha allah!
Footloose, NOS, The News International
If Shigar and its environs see a change in the coming years, they have to be thankful not only to AKCSP but to their elderly raja who gifted his palace to the organisation
By Salman Rashid
When I saw it in the summer of 1990, I despaired. Shigar Fort, as outsiders know it, or Fong Khar, to give it the real name, was in a state of near total ruin. The massive stone walls had tumbled down at various places, doors hung askew on large hinges in hefty jambs, roofs had collapsed and rain and snow had washed in the mud to fill the rooms. One room with its roof intact, perhaps the only one, was a shelter for a few cows.
I came away from Fong Khar knowing that in another few years, its last traces will have crumbled into the dust. The sad part was that it was set in a perfect idyll: smack by a boisterous stream in the midst of huge plane and mulberry trees. If only the vines that would surely have once graced its eaves and overhangs were still there, the picture would have been complete.
In August 2006, I was in Skardu and it was mentioned that Fong Khar had received a new lease of life breathed in by Aga Khan Cultural Service Pakistan (AKCSP). From utter perdition the building was once again rehabilitated. It was like a dream. I could hardly believe what I saw.
It was in the 1630s that Hasan Khan, twentieth in the line of the Amacha rulers of Shigar, returned home. Ousted from his kingdom by the neighbouring Raja of Skardu, Hasan Khan had fled to the court of Shah Jehan, the Mughal king of India. Making a return bid with royal help, he defeated the usurper and imprisoned him in Shigar. Meanwhile, he set to building Fong (Rock) Khar (Fort) with stonemasons, woodworkers and other artisans brought over from India.
The name owes itself to the huge boulder around which one part of the palace is built. One wonders why the building could not avoid this mass that juts out of the east wall and apparently serves no purpose. Perhaps Raja Hasan Khan fancied the name Fong Khar and deliberately incorporated the rock.
The architecture was strictly Balti incorporating defensive elements in a residential royal building, but the woodcarving had subtle indications of Tibetan, Kashmiri and Punjabi influences. Completing the fort, Hasan Khan moved into the valley from an older fort high up the hill to the east. From the middle years of the 17th century the family thus lived in this castle until it was abandoned in or about 1980.
Hashmatullah Khan, a bureaucrat of the Raj who spent about two decades of his service in Kashmir, visited Fong Khar in the 1890s and found it in a reasonable state of upkeep. Photos from the 1930s, however, show a rundown and all but abandoned complex of buildings. As newer annexes were raised within the Fong Khar complex, older parts of the palace were abandoned. Only the annex known as Garden House, built about 1950, served as residence for the Raja and his family as late as 2003.
It was the following year that the Raja of Shigar realising that it was beyond his capacity or that of the government to redeem the building, gifted it to AKCSP. Then he may not have imagined the ruin would be brought back from the brink. But it was that same meticulous planning and execution that gave us the restored Baltit Fort of Hunza that returned Fong Khar to its early 20th century shape. Today Fong Khan is a five-star hotel making for the perfect getaway by its noisy brook where the magpies engage in arguments and golden orioles sing on leafy treetops.
When AKCSP took over Fong Khar, it had a definite plan. After restoration the proceeds from the hotel would be divided up to keep the hotel going as well as to enable local communities to finance their own projects. While 30 percent of the profit was to be kept aside to tide over lean years that the hotel might face, and equal percentage was earmarked for maintenance – this being a nearly 400-year-old edifice, 10 percent was returned to AKCSP.
The Shigar Town Management Society received 20 percent which this year amounted to something over one million rupees. This amount will be spent by the society itself on whatever projects it deems fit. If Shigar and its environs see a change in the coming years, they have to be thankful not only to AKCSP but to their elderly raja who gifted his palace to the organisation.
Across Pakistan there are virtually thousands of historical buildings as important as exemplars of vernacular architecture as Fong Khar – many of them with the potential of becoming profitable concerns. Yet they rot, fall to pieces and are by and by lost. In the last thirty years I have seen a few hundred bite the dust. AKCSP spent money on Fong Khar and turned it into a profit-making establishment. Is it difficult that organisations (not necessarily AKCSP) replicate this sterling effort elsewhere in Pakistan?
We are slowly losing our built heritage to negligence. Will someone heed this cri de coeur and come forward to begin the long journey?