Drew Binsky · Transcript · · Updated
Entering Afghanistan's Most Ancient City (3,000 BC) – Transcript
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what's up everyone I have finally made it to herat in the western part of Afghanistan and look who I found hello everyone I'm Thomas I'm part of a YouTube channel called yes Theory and I'm so excited to be in Afghanistan with Drew your videos that you posted a year ago was like the main driver for me wanting to come here I'm so happy to have you here man I'm so excited I thought I actually thought you weren't going to come at one point really but you're here today we're going to be exploring all over the beautiful city of harat are you
ready I'm ready and uh ready to see everything that the city let's do it man foreign was a very important stop on the ancient Silk Road and today it remains
Afghanistan's third largest city it's located just a hundred kilometers or a 90 minute drive away from the border of Iran in fact I've noticed so many cultural things here that overlap with Persian culture and it makes me so happy because Iran is one of my favorite countries on Earth the architecture here reminds me of Iran it's got a lot of Persian influence like the building behind me at the market it's very very cool everywhere in Iran when they have tea they put this kind of rock candy
inside of the teacup and this is the only place nor in Afghanistan I've seen that they have this Thomas and I have been talking about coming to Afghanistan together for over a year and I'm so happy that it finally has worked out Thomas is a revenue in Afghanistan we're here to pick them up dude how are you oh my God welcome to Afghanistan what are we doing right now oh my gosh look at your outfit you made it Thomas
is really a great dude and I very much look up to him and his content so it's a special experience to be telling stories together we're going we are going right now to head out so excited man it's your first time right first time you head out yeah yeah super pumped if there's one thing I know it's gonna be an amazing and crazy day packed with activities and adrenaline the question is are you guys ready oh
our first destination is one of the most epic mosques in Afghanistan we just entered this incredible Plaza here okay Drew um welcome to the Friday Mosque of herat it's also called the Blue Mosque of herath as well uh this mosque was built during the 13th century by the timaritz they call it the Friday mosque because lots of people come here on Fridays to to do the Friday prayer so Friday prayer is a very important prayer
for Muslims and they all gather at the yard here like a probably more than a thousand people is coming here on Friday this mask reminds me a lot of the one in Samarkand Uzbekistan you have the same kind of archways the same kind of tiles the same kind of design and these huge plazas is just so incredible like I I I'm out of words right now like it's just so cool to be the only ones here and tucked away behind the mosque is the
original tile Factory which has been using the exact same process to hand make these tiles for over 700 years we couldn't help but take a peek inside so right now we are in the tile Factory that's literally behind the Friday mosque here you guys are like literally like on their hands and knees banging and making these tiles like as perfect as I can and it's been passed down generation after generation and they still use the same um ways that they've done it hundreds
and hundreds of years ago Mr umit is the head of the style Factory and everything's handmade making sure how much is from soil to actual tile it's made out of hands the tile making process goes like this first the soil is gathered from nearby areas and it looks like mud do you love me that process is really interesting then it's right here
in bulk and carefully crafted into square shapes where it is left to dry can you ask him how many tiles he can make from all that much 500. after that each tile is covered in an outer shell that consists of broken glass which gives it its shiny texture next it's thrown into the oven to be cooked at 50 percent and then each tile
is colored and then given a detailed design before being assembled next to each other like a puzzle once they're sketching and everything thing is done and this is how they bring the puzzle together here it's so much work finally it's drawn back into the oven and cooked at 900 degrees Celsius and voila you have a tile while everything has been fun and games so far if I'm being honest it's quite stressful to shoot content here this is something that I'm used to from my
travels but for Thomas it's the first time he has come across this challenge yo put the camera down it's a little nerve-wracking with the cameras yeah I'm like this is the first time I ever traveled to a country where you can like legitimately not film like most places we've already been yelled at multiple times since we landed and we just landed so it's uh definitely sinking in the reality of like wow this is going to be a very different story like a part of
the story is figuring out like how do we even film here as I'm saying this I'm looking at two giant trucks with big military guys with a huge gun uh pointed at the street and they just drove by but this is all part of the deal when traveling in Afghanistan the way I look at it is high risk to shoot but higher reward to tell these stories like a game dude like knowing where to shoot and stuff like keeping it down putting it up
it's a fun game though we made our way onwards across town to the former home of Alexander the Great Yes you heard me correctly this is so awesome because today is a holiday the entire Citadel is closed but nor was able to pull some strings and get a secret access and guess what we had the entire place to ourselves like nobody's here right now
literally oh what a what a privilege to be here right now dude it's so cool oh look at the views of the city now we don't need a drone when you can uh Elevate yourself Alexander the greatest Castle why do you need a drone if you can do that I'm so thankful to be here right now in this moment you can see the whole city of Hera behind me up here this is a very special place and I'm
just uh so happy to be here Drew Tomas here right now uh at the castle of irctiarodin they believe according to the excavation they did here in this cerebell they found uh they stumps on lots of remainings from the time of Alexander the Great which is like back to 330 BC so everything we're seeing now is not original it's all been rebuilt over time you can you can see like parts of
the walls are original but parts of the walls are are renewed for example gray spots are new and the like much like tan spots are uh old these paintings are probably like five to six hundred years old that's wild the color is still here right now I'm getting lost in Alexander the Great's former home there's so many levels to this place
dude it's like amazing here so this uh area there you'll see you'll see some dark rooms so they used to be the presents where people like doing some crazy stuff when speaking with the police officer on duty we came to find out that the Citadel is somewhat haunted it says like lots of Bloodshed here like during the course of the history even during the Taliban now sometimes we are scared even here like during the nights
here and the some of our guards and some of our caretakers they cannot stay inside the castle so we we moved everything outside of the castle now and now we are just during the nights we take care of the castle from outside on one recent incident he claims to have encountered a ghost there is somebody calling my name and I was trying to see and find where the voice is coming from and I couldn't find it and he says like
in one location it's a very dark room and says once I felt the sound is coming from that room and then when I saw there was nothing and I was really scared and he said I I came back to our base here as we were on our way out the caretaker of the Citadel invited us into the back room for some chai he's offered us three times so we finally took it that we finally took his office imagine walking around the U.S in L.A and you meet someone for the first time and they're like hey do you want to have a cup of
tea like it would never happen yeah lemon candies is it sweet great way to break up the day have a nice cup of chai a little too hot to drink but I still for sure my mouth he told us that he was open to being interviewed about some of the dark days that he had seen and what he told us was shocking I'm really curious to know
um what his experience was like when the Taliban took overheads he said he's like we have a very very uh unhappy experience like the unhappiest experience ever she says first of all it was warm Bloodshed everywhere I'm talking from 1995 to 2001. uh he says like
taking a shower having a mom is something necessary anyone need to do that but women were not allowed to go to a public her mom the women were not allowed to go to school and if you were caught like stealing they were making your face like black and taking the middle of the town like walking they were whipping you and then after the other day and they were chopping the house literally chop off
the hand in public and myself I saw hands hanged on the tree in a square in Missouri Sharif it wasn't that you see here this is from the uh the Taliban time when they shoot an RPG at the people here killed like six seven people and then the house was on fire because there was carpets and stuff and
since the smoke is from from that day wow as we hit the busy streets yet again my brain was trying to process everything that the old man just told us I feel so bad for these innocent locals here who have to live through this horrific Taliban regime it's just terrible our next stop was a place that I was looking forward to visit for years the old Jewish neighborhood and synagogue of herat foreign
we've just arrived in the old Jewish quarter here and and the synagogue is right in front of me so uh we got the key to go in and uh here we go if you guys can remember a video I did 18 months ago in Kabul about the life of zablon simentov the last remaining Jew in Afghanistan he was originally from harat I am a only one you eat
this place was really special to visit because as a Jew myself it's so fascinating to connect with my Heritage around the world is all original part of the more original wow holy crap this is really cool
whoa wow I was expecting it to be in Ruins or not beautiful but you have all these original paintings up here those parts that you see those were broken also the ceiling was broke it just restored all these new bricks roughly 2700 years ago juice settled in herat and built a thriving community in this very neighborhood in the mid 19th century it's believed that there were
over 40 000 Jews living in harat who all left for Israel in 1948 except zablon simentov who is still in Afghanistan the synagogue which was built hundreds and hundreds of years ago is still left behind and it's an incredible condition so in Judaism we have these places called a Mikvah which is like a a bath where you just get in naked and watch yourself it's usually a running stream and here was the Mikvah right here you
go down there and wash yourselves that's exactly what a makeup looks like yeah I was really curious to see if anyone living in the neighborhood today actually knows that they're living in a former Jewish settlement so I asked them I'm curious to know like do you know that you live in this former Jewish area