The Silo is an iconic Soviet-era Kabul building, now derelict and a source of fascination for the very many who drive past daily. Saib Tabrizi, a 17th century Iranian poet, wrote,
Silo road (“See-lo”) has the Soviet-era grainery and bakery as the reason why it’s known by that name. It certainly enthralled me while I was in Kabul, and so it’s with a mixture of admiration and envy that I learn of a friend managing to get access to the building.
The publicly-owned set of buildings range over 70 thousand square metres and were built with financial and technical assistance by the Soviet Union in 1956 (1335), starting operations in December of that year. At it’s height of production its largest machine could process 60 to 90 tons of grain each 24 hours, while the bakery could produce 52.7 tons of bread in 24 hours. This was big news, and important source of food for a city that very often knew hunger.
In Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) which is set before and after the reign of the Taliban the Silo is a place of work for one of his characters, giving a sense of what it was like when it was up and running: “Though Babi worked at Silo, Kabul’s gigantic bread factory, where he labored amid the heat and the humming machinery stoking the…
