Wakhan House Museum

Tajikistan


Some 500m off the main road in Yamg (Ямг) is the reconstructed house museum of Sufi mystic, astronomer and musician Mubarak Kadam Wakhani (1843–1903). One room in this brilliant little museum, built after Perestroika, contains ethnographic artefacts and 27 books and 17 poems of the master. Hidden under Stalin's rule, they escaped destruction. The other room is designed as a classic 19th-century Pamiri home with some traditional instruments on display.

On the approach lane to the museum is a 'solar calendar', a stone with a hole focused on a western ridge. The hole and a stone on the ridge are exactly aligned with the setting sun during Novruz (21st March).