Bargi Matal

Bargi Matal is the upper Bashgal valley, Nuristan's far north-east, where the Landai Sin comes down from the crest of the Hindu Kush. The district runs from Chapu, on the valley floor at about 1,900 metres, past the district centre at about 2,100 metres, to Samanak, the highest village, at about 3,000. The Shkurigul and the Manalgal come in as side valleys on the way. Below Chapu the river runs on through Kamdesh to join the Kunar at Barikot. Badakhshan lies over the crest to the west and north, and Chitral, in Pakistan, over the ridges to the east.

Its people are Kata, called Kantozi in Pashto, and they speak Eastern Kata-vari, the form of the language kept in the upper Landai Sin and in a few villages across the border in Chitral. The Mumo and the Kom of the valley below, in Kamdesh district, speak dialects of their own. The old books use other names for the same places: Bargi Matal is Robertson's Bragamatal, also called Lutdeh in Chitral, and Afsay, Pachigram, Peshawarak and Awlagul are his Apsai, Ptsigrom, Pshowar and Oulagul.

When Sir George Scott Robertson came up the valley in 1891, Bragamatal was a village of about six hundred houses in two halves joined by a bridge, and the market of the upper Bashgal, where traders from Badakhshan, Munjan and Chitral came to do business. Higher up stood the fort villages that he found only among the Kata: Ptsigrom, Pshui, Apsai and Badamuk among them, each a block of two or three storeys around a courtyard with a single gate, home to between 120 and 200 families. Robertson crossed the Mandal pass from here into Munjan; the Shawal pass led east to the Bumburet valley of Chitral.

When the Amir's army took the Bashgal in 1895 and 1896, Sardar Kashmir, a chief of Bragamatal, led about six hundred of his kin over the passes to Brumotul in Bumburet, where the Mehtar of Chitral gave them land. His son Azar, who wrote as Shaikh Abdullah Khan, set down the family's history in an Urdu manuscript around 1908. Knut Kristiansen, who studied it, called it the first book ever written by a Nuristani, as far as he knew.

Life is farming and herding: maize, wheat and beans on the valley floor, watered by stream channels, and goats and cattle. The houses are timber and stone. Above Pachigram, the Shkurigul holds one of the four main rare-metal pegmatite fields of the Nuristan belt, with spodumene and many-coloured tourmaline, and a gem mine there is worked today; three miners were killed in a landslide at Pachigram in July 2026. Snow leopards are confirmed on the high ridges, and the upper two-thirds of the district lies inside the mapped outline of Nuristan National Park.

The mountains are hard on the valley. An avalanche at Afsay on 5 February 2017 killed at least 57 people under snow two and a half metres deep. On 3 August 2026 a flash flood destroyed most of Awlagul, about eight kilometres below the district centre: UNICEF counted 191 houses destroyed or damaged, and 192 families received tents and supplies. Work on a new 30-metre bridge in the district began in September 2026.

There is one road in, from Asadabad up the Kunar to Barikot and then up the Bashgal past Kamdesh, about 161 kilometres, narrow and often cut by rain and rockfall, and closed by snow for weeks in a hard winter. There is no direct road to Parun, so people from Bargi Matal go round through Kunar to reach their own provincial capital. The old passes to Chitral and Badakhshan are not open to travellers.