Golkonda: Home of Diamonds

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According to some historians, the Kakatiya kings, part of whose territory Golkonda was, built the nucleus of the complex. It was handed over to Muhammad Shah Bahmani of Gulbarga in 1363 by one of the Kakatiya kings. Some maintain that the fort is 2000 years old and that it is older than the fort at Warangal.

After the death of Muhammad Shah Bahmani, Sultan Quli, who was the subedar of Golkonda under him, declared himself independent, thus founding the Qutub Shahi dynasty in 1518. The Qutub Shahis who ruled Golkonda for 170 years from 1518 to 1687 added to the earlier structures of the Kakatiyas and Bahmanis. Muhammad Quli Qutub Shah found water scarcity in Golkonda an intractable problem and founded a new capital on the banks of the Musi, which is now the old city of Hyderabad. Ibrahim Quli Qutub Shah, who preceded Muhammed, repaired and renovated the fort and built a small mosque midway on the steps leading to Bala Hisar.

Most impressive even in ruins, Golkonda houses a number of old buildings, mosques and palaces of historical interest. What once were well laid gardens today are barren and brown bushes. The structures or their vestiges we see today were mostly built in the time of Sultan and Ibrahim Qutub Shahs, the Safa Masjid, the Toli masjid and Kala Chabutara, for instance. It was during Ibrahim Shah’s rule that diamond mines were discovered at Kollur on the Krishna River.

“Three granite walls of megalithic construction encircle the fort,” says Raza Alikhan, author of Hyderabad: 400 Years. Of the several bastions that break the monotony of the wall Petla Burz is the biggest. A Musa Khan, a general of Abdullah Qutub Shah, built the Musa Burz towards the south of the fort to protect the fort from the first Mughal invasion in 1656. At these two bastions are posted the Fateh Rahbar gun and the Azhdaha Paikar gun. On some of these bastions, one can see inscriptions in Telugu, manifesting the interest of the Shahs in local culture. Another bastion known as the Kaghazi burz was entirely made of paper and cloth and was designed to be a camouflage. The idea behind the dummy bastion, a small distance away beyond Musa burz, was to deceive the invaders into thinking that their guns had completely ruined it.

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