All photos courtesy of the AKTC

We’d been living in Kerala for 6 months before we traveled back to the U.S. via Delhi in order to update our visas. Having only experienced the sights in my “southern home” up until that point, we scheduled our flight to allow for a Delhi city tour, and Humayun’s Tomb was the first item on the agenda.Unluckily for us the “Travel Gods” were not favoring us, and between flight delays and Delhi traffic we reached the gates of the tomb compound at 5:58pm, just in time for us to see the guard saunter over to lock them for the night. I was seriously disappointed, but I’ve since learned that perhaps those aforementioned gods were looking after our best interest after all.

On the one hand, had we visited the tomb at that time we would have found a work in progress, which is always an interesting experience and one we would have enjoyed. When we lived on a small island off the coast of Dubrovnik I remember watching in fascination as a team of craftspeople worked carefully to restore the 11th century frescoes painted on the walls of one of the small stone churches. Both the act of restoration and the outcome are noteworthy and connect well with the philosophies we’ve been working with for years.

On the other hand, there’s nothing quite like the “wow” factor one experiences when visiting a World Heritage Site, especially one that in the 16th century represented a kind of “globalization of the world” through designs that reached far into Central Asia.

The Aga Khan Trust for Culture reported that 600 master craftsmen were brought from as far away as Uzbekistan to restore the original decorative patterns and tiles. We’re happy to read this in and of itself, but additionally they in turn trained local youths who could carry on the skills.

The residents of Nizamuddin and the young men who trained as craftsmen live in the shadow of their forebears’ cultural glory, often in ramshackle conditions. The Aga Khan Trust determined that if its project was to succeed, it had to be an economic asset to the community. So it brought in toilets, health care facilities and jobs. ”

At this moment we have over 800 people employed here,” says the trust’s Luis Monreal. For conservation to be meaningful today, he says it cannot be just about restoring buildings. It must also be about uplifting the lives of those who live around them.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Read the entire article here.