Choose a continent, then guess its highlighted countries.
Choose your adventure
About Karshvar
I built Karshvar to make discovering the world easier for people who
love reading history. My biggest difficulty was always geography:
from Anatolia to the Caucasus, from the Iranian plateau to
Byzantium, I kept losing track of where important events happened.
So I started studying geography, and this game grew out of that
learning. It is both a way to test myself and a step toward the
offline companion I wanted for exploring the world. I plan to add
more historical features over time.
Karshvar takes its name from an ancient Iranian word related to
today’s Persian word for country. In Avestan cosmology, the world
was described as seven regions.
Taj Mahal · Agra Fort · Ajanta Caves · Hampi · Sanchi
1
Taj Mahal
The Taj Mahal is a memorial before it is a famous photograph. Shah
Jahan commissioned the white-marble mausoleum in Agra in memory of
his wife. Keeping that purpose in mind gives its monumental scale a
personal dimension. Pause over the relationship between the
building’s overall form and the craftsmanship that makes it feel so
carefully composed.
Agra Fort reveals another side of Mughal power. Behind its
red-sandstone walls are palaces, audience halls and mosques: the
spaces of an imperial city. Read the enclosure and the interiors
together. The strong outer boundary and the varied buildings within
show how defence, government and royal life occupied the same
complex.
Ajanta’s Buddhist caves were created in different phases, separated
by centuries. Paintings and sculpture turn the rock-cut spaces into
places of storytelling as well as worship. Take the details slowly
when studying images of the site. Small gestures and groups of
figures can hold your attention just as much as the scale of a cave.
Hampi preserves the remains of a capital of the Vijayanagara
kingdom. Its temples and palaces speak of the city’s wealth between
the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, before its conquest in 1565.
Try to imagine the connections between these buildings. The
scattered monuments once belonged to a working capital with
religious and royal centres.
Sanchi’s hilltop monuments offer a longer view of Buddhist history.
Pillars, temples and monastic remains mark a place that remained
important over many centuries. Rather than searching for one
defining building, consider how successive communities added to the
site. Its different structures make that continuity easier to
picture.
