We visited the tomb of Hayat Baksi Begum, the daughter of the fourth king of Hyderabad, wife of fifth king and mother of the sixth king (our guide repeated this so much today, it’s stuck in my mind like a broken record…with an Indian accent).

 The tomb was HUGE..and I mean really huge. The tomb is now used as a mosque with the grave of the queen lying in the middle of the space. The tomb stone is adorned with Arabic writting (Bana, our resident Jordanian, wasn’t much help with the translation, thought she did note that the text contained scripture from the Koran).

 I think our guide hired someone to pray in the mosque so we could see how their worship was expressed and hear the powerful accustics of the mosque (see video)…very cool.

 It was especially interesting to note the other surrounding tombs- about 32 other tombs contianing other great kings of Hyderabad. What was especially interesting was that there were also tombs for two famous dancers in this ‘royal graveyard’ - Taramati and Premamatie. I was stumped for a moment trying to picture two dancers that were sooooo good, they were qualified to be buried in the midst of kings.

I’m thinking they were most probably more than ‘dancers’- so I asked our guide if they were concubines of the king…he said ‘Yes’, but I don’t think he actually understood the word ‘concubines’ …oh well…