Alexander the Great Slept Here

Alexander the Great slept hereFriday October 16, 2009 On our way to the yurt camp, in Nurata, after lunch, we moseyed over to the ruins of a great fortress on the hillside. Supposedly it was one of Alexander the Great's fortresses. Marat, our guide, told us that no one can say for certain but it looked like it could have been something he built and it looked old enough and from time remembered, the locals have always called it Alexander’s fort. Well, why not. We do not he was in this part of the world and there was good water here so I’m going to say he did indeed sleep there. Also there are a couple of mosques. One was a Friday Mosque and it was Friday but we were too late and most of the worshipers had left. The other was the everyday need to stop and go say a prayer mosque. Neither of them were very large or impressive and the Friday mosque had intensive reconstruction happening. The interesting part was the back of the everyday mosque was a pool with wonderfully clear water and full of mountain trout. It was a holy pool and Marat, our guide, said that people come here to get the water and take it home all the time and ship it to relatives and such. Supposedly the fish are holy too because early people tried to catch and eat them and they died from a supposedly poison in the trout stomach. Never heard of a trout having poison so maybe it was more from bad sanitation and bad refrigeration rather than poison fish. The group had a chance to walk up the hill to Alexander’s fortress but it was a bit too steep and not enough time for me to do it. I went as high as I could in the allotted time then back to the coach and took photos of the local people who were agreeable.