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In Focus: Kabul 1879
Roger Hudson explains a photographic panorama, taken at the beginning of the Second Afghan War, of the ancient and forbidding fortress of Bala Hissar.
The Bala Hissar fortress in Kabul was already centuries old when William the Conqueror built the Tower of London. Here it is, showing its age, in 1879, in a panorama that John Burke created by joining together two of his photographs. He had accompanied the British force invading Afghanistan the previous year, after a British mission was refused entry. This, the beginning of the Second Afghan War, had been prompted by the appearance of a Russian mission in Kabul in the middle of 1878.
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