India Trip with My Parents: The Great Agra Treasure

Agra is the site of the crowning achievements of the Mughal architectural style. There is, of course, the Taj Mahal (seen on a foggy morning, third, fourth and fifth pictures from the top), completed in 1653 by the richest emperor of all, Shah Jahan, and Agra Fort, the imposing complex which was begun by the emperor Akbar in 1565 that was hence the seat of governance of all the Mughal emperors (top two pictures). Both of these are masterpieces of marble carving and the delicate gem inlay known as pietra dura.

Nearby is another treasure, the red-sandstone fortified ancient city Fatehpur Sikri, where Akbar moved the capital of his empire between 1571 and 1585, seemingly on a whim, before discovering that a shortage of water--that bane of Northern India--made living there unsustainable (bottom pictures).

Akbar was famous not just for his artistic endeavors but also for having been an unusually liberal and open-minded ruler who had three wives, a Hindu, a Muslim, and a Rajput one, and respected other religions to build a philosophers' hall, where their representatives (Sikhs, Jains, and even Jesuits) debated with the emperor, at Fatehpur Sikri (pictured). He even founded a religion which aimed to combine the world's major faiths, but this amounted to little more than the emperor's personality cult and dissolved soon after his death, mostly because of the different inclinations of his devout Muslim son, Jehangir.