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"The Bug Pit" at Zindon Prison
Where Stoddart and Connolly suffered in the infamous Bug PitIn 1842, the British soldiers Stoddart and Connolly were executed in front of the Ark Fortress of Bukhara. It was the finale in a year-long torture (in the case of Stoddart it actually lasted four years) in the Zindon prison, located within the fortress. A large amount of the time during their imprisonment, they suffered in the appropiately named Bug Pit, a four meter deep pit, accessible only by a rope lowered down through a hole into which guards poured scorpions, bugs, and rodents down into the pit on a daily basis.
Stoddart suffered three years in the prison – more than one of which he whiled away in the Bug Pit, before Conolly were thrown down to join him. Conolly had the unfortunate fate of being sent to Bukhara to release Stoddart. Both enjoyed another year together in the Bug Pit, before the Emir finally had them executed.
The crimes that caused Stoddart to be thrown into the prison in the first place were to ride on horseback into the castle rather than walking, and to arrive with not a single gift – even more offensive, a letter only from the governor of India, rather than from Queen Victoria. The letter from the governor reassured Nasrullah that the British would have no intention of continuing their invasion of Afghanistan into his kingdom.
Nasrullah was an extremely brutal ruler, and he never missed an opportunity to defended his nickname “The Butcher.“ After the British Army was defeated in Afghanistan, the Emir regarded the British Empire as a weak nation, that he could easily deal with. Thus, he regarded the two Brits to be of no value, and promptly executed them, right after they dug their own graves. The British Empire did not respond to the executions.
The Bug Pit is but one of many gruesome places in the Zindon prison, in which mannequins portray the conditions of imprisonment. Much of the rest of the enormous Ark fortress had been ruined by the Red Army in 1920, thereby putting an end to a continual inhabition of the fortress of more than 1,400 years.
Read more about "The Bug Pit" at Zindon Prison on Atlas Obscura...
Category: Museums and Collections, Crime and Punishment, Memento Mori, Dead Explorers
Location: Buxoro, Uzbekistan
Edited by: Tawsam, Mark_Casey, Rachel
