Explore the real-world places that appear in And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini. Each location on the map shows what happens there in the novel, the real history of the place, and what's there today. Featured locations include Shadbagh Village, Kabul — Wahdati Family Home, Kabul — Chicken Street Bazaar, Kabul — Bagh-e-Babur (Babur's Gardens), Kabul Museum (National Museum of Afghanistan) and 9 more.
Rural Khorasan region, near Kabul — The Wahdati family origin point
Shadbagh is the fictional Afghan village where Abdullah and Pari grow up in poverty with their father Saboor and stepmother Parwana. It is here in 1952 that Saboor makes the devastating decision to sell little Pari to the wealthy Wahdati family in Kabul, believing he is giving her a better life. Abdullah, who adored his sister above all else and collected feathers for her, is left shattered by her absence — a wound that never fully heals across his entire lifetime.
Rural villages in the Khorasan region of Afghanistan have historically been characterized by subsistence farming, harsh winters, and deep poverty. Many such communities depended on seasonal labor migration to Kabul for survival, particularly during the mid-20th century before Soviet intervention.
The village of Shadbagh is fictional, but it maps onto countless real Afghan rural communities in the provinces surrounding Kabul that continue to face poverty, displacement, and hardship following decades of war.
Wazir Akbar Khan district, Kabul — Pari's new life
Nila and Suleiman Wahdati live in an affluent Kabul home in the upscale Wazir Akbar Khan district. It is to this house that Saboor delivers young Pari, who is adopted into the family. The household is managed by Nabi, the cook and chauffeur — who is also Parwana's brother — and it is Nabi who originally brokered the arrangement. Pari is raised here, unaware of her true origins, while the haunted, paralyzed Suleiman eventually communicates his guilt and grief to Nabi in a long letter.
Wazir Akbar Khan is one of Kabul's historically wealthiest neighborhoods, home to embassies, foreign missions, and affluent Afghan families since the mid-20th century. During the Soviet era and subsequent civil war, many wealthy Kabul families fled abroad, leaving their properties behind.
Wazir Akbar Khan remains one of Kabul's more affluent districts, housing embassies and NGO offices. Since the Taliban takeover in 2021, many former residents have fled, and the neighborhood's character has changed dramatically.
Shahr-e-Naw, Kabul — The city's commercial and cultural heart
Kabul's streets and bazaars serve as the backdrop for the city's social life as depicted in the novel. Nabi navigates the city as Suleiman's driver, witnessing the vibrant street life that preceded war and ruin. The novel evokes Kabul as a place of beauty and complexity before the Soviet invasion shattered it — a world of gardens, music, and commerce that the characters mourn as their lives scatter across the globe.
Chicken Street in Shahr-e-Naw was one of Kabul's most famous commercial corridors, known for handicrafts, antiques, and textiles. It flourished as a tourist destination in the 1960s and 1970s when Kabul was a stop on the hippie trail before war transformed the city.
Chicken Street still exists as a market area, though its character has shifted considerably. It remains a point of commerce in a city that has endured decades of conflict, and continues to be used by locals and occasional foreign workers.
Southwest Kabul — Gardens of the Mughal Emperor
The gardens and open spaces of Kabul represent the city's lost beauty that suffuses the novel's nostalgic grief. Hosseini's Afghanistan is recalled by characters in Paris and San Francisco as a place of terraces, flowers, and mountain air — a homeland carried in memory long after it has been destroyed. The gardens embody the pre-war Kabul that Nabi and others mourn, the city that existed before the Soviet invasion turned it to rubble.
Bagh-e-Babur was established in the early 16th century by the Mughal Emperor Babur, who chose it as his final resting place. The gardens fell into disrepair during the civil war and Taliban period but were restored by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture starting in 2002.
Bagh-e-Babur has been restored as a public park and is one of Kabul's most visited historic sites. The gardens contain Babur's tomb, a mosque, and terraced lawns, and were a beloved public space for Kabul families, though access has become restricted under Taliban rule.
Visit: Bagh-e-Babur (Babur's Gardens) (historic site)
Darulaman Road, Kabul — Culture of a broken city
The cultural institutions of Kabul represent the fragile civilization Hosseini's characters carry in memory. In the novel, Afghanistan's history of culture and scholarship contrasts with the destruction wrought by war. The museum, looted during the civil war, stands as a metaphor for the generational loss and cultural rupture that the novel's characters — Pari, Abdullah, Nabi — embody as the country falls apart around them.
The National Museum of Afghanistan, founded in 1919, once housed one of Asia's finest collections of Central Asian art and artifacts. It was devastated during the 1992–1996 civil war, losing an estimated 70% of its collection to looting, and was further damaged under the Taliban.
The museum has undergone significant restoration with international support and reopened with a reduced but meaningful collection. It remains one of Kabul's few functioning cultural institutions and a symbol of Afghan resilience, though its future remains uncertain under Taliban governance.
Visit: National Museum of Afghanistan (museum)
Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris — Pari's Parisian childhood
After Suleiman's death and Nabi's refusal to leave Kabul, Nila takes Pari to Paris, where she raises her in the bohemian atmosphere of the Left Bank. Nila is a celebrated poet — volatile, beautiful, wounded, alcoholic — and Paris becomes the city where Pari grows up believing herself to be Nila's natural daughter. It is only after Nila's suicide and the discovery of Nabi's letter that Pari begins to understand the truth of her origins and her lost brother Abdullah.
Saint-Germain-des-Prés has been Paris's literary and intellectual heartland since the existentialist movement of the 1940s and 1950s. It was home to writers, poets, and artists — including Afghan and Iranian expatriates — who gathered in its cafés and apartments throughout the Cold War era.
Saint-Germain-des-Prés remains one of Paris's most celebrated and expensive neighborhoods, now known as much for luxury boutiques as for its literary heritage. Cafés like Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots preserve the bohemian atmosphere that Nila would have inhabited.
172 Boulevard Saint-Germain, Paris — Nila's world of poets and artists
The literary café culture of Saint-Germain-des-Prés is deeply associated with Nila Wahdati's world in Paris. Nila, a poet who publishes controversial verse and gives provocative interviews, inhabits a world of artistic salons and bohemian circles. Her Paris is one of cigarettes, wine, adoring admirers, and devastating loneliness — a life that entrances those around her even as it destroys her from within.
Café de Flore opened in the 1880s and became a legendary gathering place for French intellectuals. Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and countless writers and artists made it their second home. It has been one of Paris's most storied literary institutions for over a century.
Café de Flore remains fully operational on Boulevard Saint-Germain and continues to attract writers, artists, tourists, and Parisians. It hosts the annual Prix de Flore literary prize and remains an active symbol of Paris's intellectual life.
Visit: Café de Flore (restaurant)
20th arrondissement, Paris — Memory, loss, and the dead
Death and grief are threaded through the novel's entire architecture — Nila's suicide, the loss of Pari's original family, Abdullah's fading memory. The great Parisian cemetery evokes the novel's meditation on what the dead leave behind and how the living carry it. Pari, as a grown woman in Paris, must reckon with the suicide of her adoptive mother Nila and eventually with the letter that reveals the life she was taken from.
Père Lachaise, opened in 1804, is the world's most visited cemetery. It is the final resting place of Oscar Wilde, Frédéric Chopin, Édith Piaf, and Marcel Proust, among many others. Its labyrinthine paths and elaborate tombs have made it a site of pilgrimage and reflection for two centuries.
Père Lachaise is open to the public as both an active cemetery and a historic monument. Visitors come to pay respects at famous graves and to walk among its remarkable tombs and sculptures, making it one of Paris's most haunting and beloved public spaces.
Visit: Cimetière du Père-Lachaise (historic site)
Cyclades Islands, Greece — Markos and the plastic surgeon's life
Tinos is the Greek island where Dr. Markos Varvaris, a plastic surgeon, has spent much of his adult life apart from his devoted mother Odelia. The novel traces Markos's complicated relationship with his disfigured childhood friend Thalia, whose mother Madaline abandoned her for a life of selfish glamour. The island scenes form one of the novel's key interlocking chapters, exploring beauty, disfigurement, love, and what it means to be truly seen.
Tinos is a Cycladic island in the Aegean Sea, known primarily as a major site of Greek Orthodox pilgrimage centered on the Church of Panagia Evangelistria, which houses a famous icon of the Virgin Mary. The island has a strong tradition of marble sculpture and Catholic Venetian heritage.
Tinos remains an active pilgrimage site and increasingly popular tourist destination, known for its distinctive marble craftsmanship, excellent cuisine, and traditional villages. The island draws both religious visitors and travelers seeking an authentic Cycladic experience.
Visit: Tinos Island (landmark)
Port of Tinos — Pilgrimage, faith, and sacrifice
The religious and spiritual atmosphere of Tinos permeates the chapters involving Markos and his mother Odelia. The novel's themes of devotion — whether to faith, to children, or to the memory of the absent — are embodied in the pilgrimage culture of the island. Odelia's fierce, selfless love for her son Markos mirrors the sacrificial devotion the novel explores across all its interlocking stories.
The Church of Panagia Evangelistria was built in 1823 to house a miraculous icon of the Virgin Mary discovered after visions reported by a nun, Sister Pelagia. Every August 15th, thousands of pilgrims crawl on their knees from the port to the church, making it one of the most important religious sites in Greece.
The church remains one of Greece's most significant Orthodox pilgrimage destinations, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors annually. The icon of the Virgin Mary is elaborately decorated with offerings from the faithful and the church treasury contains remarkable votive gifts.
Visit: Church of Panagia Evangelistria (historic site)
Fremont / San Francisco Bay Area — The Afghan diaspora
Abdullah emigrates to the United States and settles in the Bay Area, part of the large Afghan diaspora community centered around Fremont. He raises a daughter he names Pari — after his lost sister — and lives a life shadowed by the sister he lost in 1952. As old age brings dementia, he loses his memories, and his American-born daughter Pari must piece together the family's fragmented history. The novel's American chapters explore what immigration costs and what it preserves.
Fremont, California developed one of the largest Afghan communities in the United States following the Soviet invasion of 1979 and the subsequent waves of Afghan refugees. Sometimes called 'Little Kabul,' this community grew particularly in the 1980s and 1990s and has become a major center of Afghan-American cultural life.
Fremont's Afghan-American community remains one of the most significant Afghan diaspora communities in the world, with mosques, restaurants, grocery stores, and cultural organizations serving tens of thousands of Afghan-Americans. The community has seen new waves of arrivals following the 2021 Taliban takeover.
Fremont, California — Afghan diaspora community
The Afghan-American community of Fremont is the world Abdullah inhabits in his American years. He carries the memory of Afghanistan — of Shadbagh, of young Pari, of their father Saboor — while building a life in California. His American daughter Pari grows up between two worlds, shaped by a father who named her for a ghost and who eventually loses even the memory of why. The Bay Area Afghan community represents the novel's meditation on what emigration preserves and what it forever loses.
The Fremont Afghan community began forming in the early 1980s as refugees fled the Soviet-Afghan War. The area around Fremont's Centerville district became known as 'Little Kabul,' with Afghan restaurants, halal markets, and cultural centers. It is estimated that over 50,000 Afghan-Americans live in the Tri-City area.
Little Kabul in Fremont continues to thrive as a commercial and cultural hub for Afghan-Americans. Visitors can find Afghan restaurants, bakeries, and shops along Fremont's main corridors, and the community hosts cultural events celebrating Afghan heritage.
Visit: Little Kabul, Fremont (landmark)
Kabul River crossing — Gateway between worlds
The journey from Shadbagh to Kabul that Saboor makes with Abdullah and young Pari passes through the landscape and crossings of the Afghan countryside into the city. The Kabul River and its crossings represent the threshold Pari crosses when she is handed to the Wahdatis — the moment when one life ends and another begins, when a brother loses a sister and a sister loses her true name. Hosseini uses journey and landscape throughout the novel to mark transformative ruptures in his characters' lives.
Pul-e-Khishti, meaning 'Brick Bridge,' is one of Kabul's oldest and most historically significant crossings over the Kabul River, located near the city's central bazaar. It has served as a vital commercial and transit point for centuries and is adjacent to one of Kabul's oldest mosques.
Pul-e-Khishti and its surrounding bazaar district remain active parts of Kabul's urban fabric. The area is one of the city's busiest commercial zones, and the Pul-e-Khishti Mosque adjacent to the bridge is among Kabul's most important religious sites.
Afghan-Pakistan border — The crossing point of refugees
The routes out of Afghanistan that the novel's characters take — toward Pakistan, toward the West — pass through the mountain corridors that have served as escape routes for millions of Afghan refugees. The Khyber Pass and border crossings represent the novel's theme of departure and the price of survival: what you carry and what you leave behind. Characters who end up in Paris and San Francisco all passed through some version of this threshold, the point at which Afghanistan became memory.
The Khyber Pass has been one of history's most strategic mountain passes, linking Afghanistan and the Indian subcontinent for millennia. It was a major route for Alexander the Great, the Mughal emperors, and British colonial forces. During the Soviet-Afghan War, it became a critical corridor for mujahideen supply lines and refugee exodus.
The Khyber Pass remains an active transit route between Pakistan and Afghanistan, though it has been periodically closed due to security concerns. It passes through the tribal areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and remains one of the world's most historically resonant mountain corridors.
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