The Castle Hotel

07/10/2026

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29/08/2026

29/08/2026

The photograph was taken in a refugee camp in Pakistan in 1984 and ran on a magazine cover the following June. It became the most reproduced portrait that magazine ever published. Nobody knew who she was.

In 2002 the photographer went back and found a woman he believed was her. Proving it fell to the Cambridge professor who invented iris recognition. He compared the iris codes from the 1984 photograph and a new one taken 18 years later. The odds against a false match came out at six million to one on the right eye and a thousand trillion to one on the left.

Her name is Sharbat Gula. She was orphaned at six during the Soviet invasion and carried to Pakistan by her grandmother. She had never seen the picture of herself.

The eyes that made her the most recognizable face in Afghanistan were the thing that proved she was who she said she was. In 2016 she was deported from Pakistan, the country she had lived in since she was six, over an identity card. Italy evacuated her to Rome in 2021.