Bākharz

Bakharz was a district of Khorasan between Jam and the approaches to Herat. Its chief town, Malin, stood amid villages and cultivated land on routes linking Nishapur, Herat and Merv. Medieval geographers praised the fertility of the district: grain and grapes were exported, cloth was woven, and its long melons were celebrated across Khorasan.

In the fourteenth century Hamd Allah Mustawfi described the productive countryside around Malin. The district also produced scholars whose names carried the epithet Bakharzi to other cities. Later Uzbek incursions disrupted this country, which lay on the roads between the rival powers of Iran and Transoxiana. The ruins of Malin recall the former centre of a district that once joined the economic and cultural worlds of Nishapur and Herat.