Old Srinagar

The maps of Old Srinagar suggest a grid. The reality is a series of narrowing lanes that contradict each other, that end in courtyards or turn suddenly into covered bazaar passages, that deliver you to the edge of the Jhelum River or to the gate of a mosque you weren’t looking for. I spent my first afternoon here completely lost, which was the correct way to begin. I was looking for the Jama Masjid and found instead the covered bazaar of Maharaj Gunj, where the smell of saffron and dried apricots and Kashmiri woollen goods hits you at the entrance and follows you for a hundred metres. By the time I found the mosque I had lost forty-five minutes and bought a quarter kilogram of dried mulberries from a man who insisted on giving me a sample first.

The Jama Masjid is enormous and austere, built from deodar cedar around a square courtyard large enough to hold tens of thousands of worshippers for Friday prayers. The proportions are horizontal rather than vertical — it does not reach upward like a cathedral but spreads outward, a forest of two hundred and seventy-eight pillars supporting a roof that filters the light in long strips. I sat in the courtyard after Friday prayers had emptied and watched a group of old men in phirans — the long Kashmiri woollen gowns — moving slowly toward the gate, carrying the unhurried quality of people on their way home from something that happens every week and still matters. The mosque was built in 1400, burnt down several times, rebuilt each time in the same form. There is a specific kind of confidence in that.

The Shah Hamdan Mosque, a ten-minute walk south along the Jhelum riverbank, operates at a different register entirely. It is smaller, older in feeling, covered inside and out with papier-mâché decoration — the blue-and-red and gold patterns that are Kashmiri craft at its most distinctive, applied here in the fifteenth century. Women are not permitted inside, but the view from the river of the wooden facade with its tiered roof and carved ornamentation is one of the most distinctive buildings I have seen anywhere. I stood on the old wooden footbridge over the Jhelum and looked at it for a long time.

The craft lanes behind the Nowhatta bazaar are where the living industries of Old Srinagar operate. Walnut woodcarving workshops where men with chisels are making the same furniture designs that were shipped to Victorian drawing rooms in England. Papier-mâché workshops, the air sweet with lacquer and paint. Pashmina dealers showing shawls in rooms lined floor to ceiling with shelves — not the polyester tourist versions but actual Kashmiri pashmina, which is a different object entirely, something you can pass through a ring and that costs accordingly. The craftsmen are not performing for tourists; most of them are working to fixed orders from buyers in Delhi and beyond. Watching someone carve a walnut panel with the focused expression of a person doing a skilled job they’ve done for years is more interesting than any heritage walk.

When to go: Old Srinagar is a year-round destination, but September and October are ideal — the light in the bazaars is golden, the city is busy but not overrun, and the food is at its best with the autumn harvest in full flow. The old city has a particular energy during Muharram and Eid, though both can affect movement through certain lanes. Winter is cold but navigable — the wooden buildings hold the smoke and smell of kangaroo fires in a way that feels atmospheric rather than uncomfortable.