Pakol: the rolled wool cap of the northern hills

The pakol (پکول, pakol) is a flat-topped cap of thick wool with a brim that is rolled up from a woollen bag, worn from Chitral and Swat to Nuristan and the Pashtun hills of eastern Afghanistan. It did not begin as a Pashtun cap. The earliest accounts place it among the mountain peoples of the far north, and in eastern Afghanistan it became common through the war against the Soviet army. [2, 3, 5]

• What it is: a cap sewn from woollen cloth, with a flat crown and a rim rolled upward, usually in earth colours. [5, 7]

• Where it began: the Gilgit and Astor country, then Chitral, then Nuristan. [2, 3, 5]

• Where it is made: Chitral, Swat, Peshawar, Kunar and Jalalabad. In 2014 most of the caps sold in Kabul came from Peshawar. [5, 9, 11]

• Names: pakol in Pashto writing, śukokuṛ in Kamviri, the Nuristani language, and "Chitrali cap" in Robertson's book of 1896. [1, 4, 7]

A cap of the Dards

The British writer Frederic Drew, in his 1875 geographical account of the Jummoo and Kashmir territories, described the headgear of the people he called Dards. The cap, he wrote, was a bag of woollen cloth about half a yard long, rolled up outwards at the edges until it fitted the head, and the roll protected from cold or sun "nearly as good as a turban". [3] In Tribes of the Hindoo Koosh (1880) John Biddulph wrote that in Gilgit, Astor and most of Yaghestan men commonly wore this rolled woollen cap, while in Chitral, Wakhan and Sarikol they wore very small turbans. [2]

That is the oldest description of the pakol in these sources, and it sits in the north, not among the Pashtuns. Fabrizio Foschini of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, who wrote the fullest account of the cap's social history, argues for Chitral as the source of the cap's spread, since Chitral lay at the centre of its early range, which at the start of the 20th century covered mainly northern Swat, Gilgit, Hunza and Nuristan. [5] He also reports that Willem Vogelsang, a historian of Afghanistan and its textiles who studied the cap, puts its origin further north-east, in Hunza, and that the German traveller Albert Herrlich called it the "Kashgari" cap in 1935. [5]

Foschini also points to the kausia, the flat woollen cap of the Macedonians, and suggests it may be a legacy of Alexander's army. [5] He gives this as his own reading of a resemblance, and the dated evidence above comes from Drew and Biddulph, writing in the 1870s.

How it is made

The cap is made from shu or patti, the thick woollen cloth of Chitral, and the cloth explains most of what the cap is. Women wash the wool and spin it into thread by hand, and the thread is woven into patti, from which the caps, long coats and waistcoats of Chitral are made. [10] An anthropologist's film made in Madaklasht in the Shishi Koh valley of Chitral records the whole sequence, from washing the sheep in spring water to carding, teasing, spinning and weaving. [6] The Express Tribune, quoting a group that promotes Chitral's crafts, says patti has been woven there from the wool of local sheep, yak and ibex. [10]

Hand-loomed patti uses pure local wool for both warp and weft, according to Sadiq Amin, a shopkeeper in Peshawar's Chitrali Bazaar, quoted by Dawn in 2015. He said power-loomed cloth from Lahore and Swat uses imported New Zealand wool for the weft and cotton for the warp, and sold at Rs70 to Rs150 a metre against Rs650 for hand-loomed cloth, and that hand-loomed cloth keeps its shine after five or six washes where the factory cloth loses it after one. [8] A Chitral trader, Haji Zahidullah, told the same paper that power-loom cloth is three times cheaper, and that only the well-off buy the hand-loomed kind. [8]

The shape is Drew's: a woollen bag, rolled at the edge until it fits. The brim can be pulled down over the ears or rolled up. Makers and wearers shape it differently. Foschini writes that the Panjshiris like theirs thick with chubby rolls, almost like helmets, while the pakol that spread through Paktia in the 1980s has a broad brim and a thin tight roll, which makes it stiff and gives the wearer a mushroom outline. [5] The cap is pocket-sized. Foschini lists flowers, pheasant feathers, porcupine quills, pre-rolled cigarettes and talkhan, dried mulberry powder, tucked into its fold. [5]

From Chitral to Nuristan

Nuristan is often named as the cap's home, but the early accounts say otherwise. Foschini reports that Biddulph has the Kafirs, as Nuristanis were then called, avoiding headgear altogether, at least the men. [5] George Scott Robertson, in his book of 1896, wrote that the great majority of male Kafirs wore nothing on the head in summer or winter, and that a favourite head-dress was "the soft roll-up Chitrali cap", which only the Bashgul valley Kafirs could get, and only a small share of them. [4] Bashgul, the easternmost valley, had the most dealings with Chitral, and Foschini writes that its people got the cap by trade. [5]

After Abdur Rahman Khan's conquest of Kafiristan and the people's conversion to Islam in 1895 and 1896, the cap spread quickly, in Foschini's account. Foschini suggests that the opening of the valleys to trade, and the end of the old hairstyle, gave men a reason to cover their heads, and that they chose a cap they already knew. [5] The cap did not follow only the conquerors, Foschini notes. A 1929 photograph by the Norwegian linguist Georg Morgenstierne shows two Kafir elders in Chitral, a headman and a singing priest, among the refugees who had fled in 1896 to avoid conversion, both in Chitrali caps. [5]

By 1956 the Englishman Wilfred Thesiger's photographs show the pakol throughout Nuristan, though the westernmost valley, Ramgal, still shows pakols mixed with small white turbans like those of Panjshir. [5] Nancy Hatch Dupree's survey of Afghan clothing for the Encyclopaedia Iranica lists the flat-topped woollen cap with a rolled rim among the dress of Nuristan, as pakōl generally and śukokuṛ in Kamviri. [7]

Samiullah Taza, a Nuristani writer, argues in Pashto that the cap is the old woollen dress of what he calls Bolorestan, the mountain country from Kashmir to western Nuristan and the border of Panjshir. In Afghanistan, he says, it is an inheritance of the Nuristanis, who before 1978 were recognised in the cities by it. [1] His claim that the cap belongs first to those mountains fits what Biddulph, Drew and Robertson saw. His wider claim about "Bolorestan" is his own, and he gives no source for it. [1]

Among the Pashtuns

The Pashtuns of the north-east took the cap up in steps, which Foschini dates from travellers' photographs and notes. Thesiger's porters from the Safi Pashtuns of upper Kunar wore it in 1956. [5] Diplomats on summer trips from Kabul in 1960 saw the Safis taking it up more and more, while villagers in the lower Kunar valley still wore other caps. [5] In the following two decades it reached Jalalabad but made little mark there, because people were very fond of the turban and its religious dignity, in Foschini's words. [5] The older caps of the region are described in the turban article and in Pashtun dress.

Across the border the supply came by a different road. Chitralis, many from upper Chitral, set up in Peshawar in the late 1940s, in the quarter beside Qissa Khwani that is now called the Chitrali Bazaar. [8, 9] Dawn, in January 2015, reported that four things were still in demand there each winter: the Chitrali pakol, the embroidered chugha robe, the waistcoat and the woollen coat. [9] A Chitrali dealer told the paper that there were about 4,000 shops selling patti goods and about 45,000 families in the trade. These are his figures. [9]

In Kunar the craft is local. In April 2026 Sharq News described workshops in Asadabad, the provincial capital, where men still sew caps from animal wool. One of them, Abdul Ghafar, aged 65, said he had made them for 40 years and that in the cold of Kunar and Nuristan the cap is a necessity as well as a custom. [11]

The mujahideen and Ahmad Shah Massoud

The pakol became the cap of the war against the Soviet army and the Kabul government. Foschini writes that Ahmad Shah Massoud stopped in Nuristan while travelling from Chitral to Panjshir in late 1978 and joined the local mujahideen, and that it was most likely then that he and his men acquired pakols. [5] Taza says the cap passed from the Nuristani mujahideen to Massoud's Panjshiris. [1] Some Panjshiris, and some foreigners, say instead that traders brought the first pakols over the mountains to the upper Panjshir valley, to Parian, from Nuristani valleys such as Mandol and Ramgal. [5] Foschini gives both accounts and does not choose between them.

Taza gives practical reasons why fighters preferred it to a turban or a white skullcap: it helped to conceal a man, and it kept him warm in the mountains and valleys where fighters spent their nights. [1] Foschini adds that it is warm, pocketable and does not make the wearer sweat. [5] French photographers and film-makers made Massoud's cap known abroad in the early 1980s, and he wore it slanted on his head. [5] Under his example the cap became the mark of mujahideen across the south-east and north-east, from Logar to Badakhshan and from Nangarhar to Kunduz. [5] Paktia, Foschini says, adopted it from the early 1980s, in its own broad-brimmed form. [5] The war itself is told in the Soviet war and the refugees.

The cap then lost its connection to one party. Foschini notes that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who fought Massoud, and Osama bin Laden were both photographed in pakols. [5] After Massoud was killed in September 2001, many others tried to borrow his look. [5] The Afghan Taliban did not adopt it, Foschini wrote in 2014, and even new insurgents kept their attachment to the turban, wearing the pakol only occasionally and locally. [5]

Hasht-e Subh, an Afghan news outlet, reported on 26 September 2022 that the Taliban arrested and tortured two elderly men in Kharo village in Panjshir for wearing the pakol and being from Panjshir, citing unnamed sources. [12] This is one outlet's report. Taza, for his part, regrets that the cap is now also worn by people who do wrong and commit crimes, and that this has soured some people's view of it. [1]

One cap, several names

Foschini notes that the cap is often called the "Tajik hat" or the "Panjshiri hat" because of Massoud's circle, but by the same right it could be called an "Eastern Pashtun hat" or a "Pashai hat", and that "Nuristani hat" or "Chitrali hat" would be closer to its history. [5] He adds that pakols are now worn by Hazara, Uzbek, Turkmen, Pamiri and Aimaq men as well. [5]

Most pakols worn in Afghanistan are still made in Pakistan. Foschini found in 2014 that most of those in the Kabul bazaars came from Peshawar, a few from Lahore, with a small share of better caps from Swat and the best from Chitral. A Peshawar cap cost the trader about a dollar and sold in Kabul for three or four times that, while the few made in Kunar and Jalalabad sold for 15 to 20 dollars. [5]

The cap is a mountain cap from the north that trade carried to Nuristan and Kunar and war carried across eastern Afghanistan. The turban stays the headdress of many men, and Dupree lists the pakol among several caps of the country. [7] The lambskin hat that marked educated town men from the early 20th century has its own article, the karakul cap. [7]