Shehr-e-Khaas — A Srinagar Old City Walk

This is not a sightseeing loop; it is a morning inside Shehr-e-Khaas, the oldest part of Srinagar. The old city grew along the Jhelum and its bridges, the kadals, which still give its quarters their names — Zaina Kadal, Fateh Kadal, Habba Kadal. Most visitors see it through a car window on the way to the lake. We walk it, with a folklorist-guide.

On the right bank of the Jhelum stands Khanqah-e-Moula, first raised in 1395 in memory of the Sufi preacher Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani and rebuilt after fires. Its walls and ceilings are worked in carved wood and painted papier-mâché. A short walk away, the Jamia Masjid, founded in 1394, carries its roof on 378 wooden columns of deodar — a forest standing indoors.

Between the shrines, the city’s crafts are still at work. In a papier-mâché studio, you watch the same painted surfaces you saw in the khanqah being made by hand. In the old bazaars, copper-smiths beat and engrave vessels for Kashmiri kitchens. At a neighbourhood kandur’s oven, you eat girda and kulcha with noon chai, the pink salt tea of Kashmir.

Your guide reads the city as you walk — its timber, its Sufi memory, its trades — until the old city stops being a view and becomes a place you have stood inside.