Fatehpur Sikri is only to one forty kilometers of Agra and one visits usually this city is while going towards Jaipur (the Rajasthan) or in contrary direction, while going from Jaipur to Agra.
While arriving on the spot, one is astonished first of all to see only one modest village without nothing in particular. It is that Fatehpur Sikri is what one pompeusement calls a phantom city.
Built in 1571 on order of the Akbar emperor, after it had visited to a Moslem saint living there, the palate was quickly finished and, since 1573, the emperor took possession with his court of it. It is said that military reasons (a campaign against the Afghans) would have led it to leave the places in 1585. Another reason, more probable, is that the city missed water and that it had been intolerable in the event of seat.
The pink sandstone monuments remained in a completely exceptional state of conservation and one begins to think that this city has being well quickly forgotten, after his abandonment, not to have apparently never known plunderings and destruction.
Testimonys of the imperial magnificence are drawn up still here and Fatehpur Sikri is a remarkable place from the artistic and architectural point of view. Thus the imperial city offers it to the visitor palate, bâiments with colonnades, kiosks, houses, course and basins, mosques, caravanserai. Its at the same time sober buildings and baroques form an extraordinary synthesis of the architectural tendencies of the time of its construction. Indeed, the emperor wished that this new city reflect the Hindu tradition, but also Islamic art, of the elements of the style bouddhic, even Christians.
One visits there mainly the hall of the public audiences (Diwan-I-Am), the hall of the private audiences (Diwan-i-Khas) remarkable especially by his monumental central pillar supporting all the building, very elegant Panch Mahal, on several floors in withdrawal the ones compared to the others.
Top, one profits from a superb sight on the unit of the buildings of the palates, and many other buildings disseminated in this peaceful site.
A little further, is the large mosque (Jama Masjid). One will also give his attention to the beautiful white marble tomb of Sheikh Salim Chishti, saint Moslem soufi very venerated by many pilgrims, that one even which announced to the Akbar emperor the birth close to the son that it hoped for.