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Golkonda: Home of Diamonds
 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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