Buzkashi

A game without a rulebook

Buzkashi is the national sport of Afghanistan. Riders on horseback compete to place a goat or calf carcass in a goal. The carcass is beheaded and disembowelled, two limbs are cut off, and it is soaked in cold water for a day before play to toughen it.

There is no written code. Buzkashi is, in the description given of it, governed and regulated by its own traditions, by the social context and its customs, and by the implicit understandings among the players. The objective in the more demanding form is to take the carcass, round a flag at the far end of the field, and drop it into a chalked circle — the circle of justice.

There are two main forms. Tudabarai is the simpler: get hold of the carcass and carry it free and clear in any direction. Qarajai is the one with the flag and the circle.

The rider and the horse

A player is a chapandaz. It takes a long apprenticeship of practice and watching, and a chapandaz is typically in his forties before he is any good. The saying is that a win is eighty per cent horse and twenty per cent rider, and the horses train at least as hard as the men. A buzkashi horse can cost up to fifty thousand dollars, and they are bought in from Uzbekistan and elsewhere in Central Asia — Afghanistan lost its capacity to breed champion horses through the decades of war.

Matches are usually paid for by someone. Powerful figures sponsor them as a demonstration of wealth and influence. Whoever scores takes a cash prize and another round begins, until the organisers call a final round with larger prizes.

Winter Fridays

The game belongs to the cold months, because heat is hard on the horses. Major matches are held in winter after Friday prayers; in Sheberghan in the north you could catch a game after noon prayers most Fridays through the season. Mazar-i-Sharif is the best-known venue, and a tournament is played there during the Gul-e Surkh festival in spring.

The window shown here is approximate. The Afghan sources say only "winter", without naming months; the months given are the reckoning used for the season in Tajikistan, where high temperatures stop play outside them. Treat it as when to start asking, not as a calendar.

Banned, then allowed

The Taliban banned buzkashi during their first period in power, along with many other forms of entertainment, as immoral. When they returned in 2021 they allowed the sport to continue — which makes it one of the few things on this atlas's Afghan pages that was not taken away.