Mrs. Dupree, who arrived in Afghanistan in 1962, devoted decades to preserving the country’s heritage in its darkest days.
KABUL, Afghanistan — Nancy Hatch Dupree, an American writer and historian who arrived in Afghanistan in 1962 and devoted decades of her life to preserving the country’s heritage during some of its darkest times, died in Kabul on Sunday. She was 89.
Her death was announced by the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University.
Weakened by a leg injury and a failing heart and lungs, but resistant to returning to the United States for treatment, Mrs. Dupree had been focusing on what would become her final project: cataloging thousands of photos, some from the early years she and her archaeologist husband, Louis Dupree, spent traveling Afghanistan — she writing guide books, he excavating its ancient past.
Mrs. Dupree wrote five books, and more than 100 articles and pamphlets, on Afghanistan. Her legacy, which she often described as the completion of her husband’s vision, is an academic oasis: the Afghanistan Center, a state-of-the-art research hub that houses more than 100,000 items of primary and secondary sources.
Mrs. Dupree bore witness to decades of history, but perhaps the greatest dangers she overcame were during the period of Taliban rule, from 1996 to 2001.
Omara Khan Massoudi, the former director of Afghanistan’s National Museum, who knew Mrs. Dupree for 43 years, recalled her making trips to Kabul during those years. The Taliban set out to destroy cultural artifacts as un-Islamic; Mrs. Dupree helped install 32 metal doors in the museum’s galleries to protect what had survived.
“There is a line which I learned from her, and I added it in the calendar when I was the head of the National Museum, and we later inscribed it on a stone at the museum, ” Mr. Massoudi said. “The line reads: A nation stays alive if its culture stays alive.”
President Ashraf Ghani, who knew the couple for decades, first crossing paths with them as a young scholar of anthropology, called Mrs. Dupree “a great servant of Afghan history and culture.” Hugo Llorens, the top United States diplomat to Kabul, said that “her love for this country and dedication to its culture and history we will be forever remembered.”
Nancy Hatch was born on Oct. 3,1927, in Cooperstown, N.Y., and grew up in what was then the kingdom of Travancore in British India, now the state of Kerala in India. Both her parents were involved in Asian cultures; her father, who was close to the maharaja, or ruler, of Travancore, later advised the governments of India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) on development matters, while her mother studied Indian theater.
She attended high school in Mexico, graduated from Barnard College and received a master’s degree in Chinese art from Columbia University. After graduation, she returned to Asia, joining her father in working for Unesco.
While at Columbia, she met Alan D. Wolfe, an aspiring diplomat with New York roots. They married in Ceylon, and she joined him when the Foreign Service posted him to Iraq, Pakistan and then to Kabul, in 1962.
There, she and Mr. Dupree, who was also married, began an affair. To top off the scandal, the spouses they divorced ended up marrying each other.
(How the affair began remains unclear, as James Verini’s article about the Duprees, “ Love and Ruin, ” which won a National Magazine Award in 2015, points out. The article also notes that Mr. Wolfe was in fact the C. I. A. station chief in Afghanistan, under the guise of working as the United States Embassy’s cultural attaché.)
The Duprees were at the center of the social scene in Kabul for years, until they were kicked out by the communist government on suspicion of being spies. They settled in Peshawar, Pakistan, then the hub of the Afghan guerrilla fighters preparing and training to topple the communist regime. Mr. Dupree continued to make trips to Afghanistan, with the guerrillas, while Mrs. Dupree worked with refugees.
During the Taliban years, Mrs. Dupree made repeated trips to Kabul to meet with their senior officials, both to preserve the public library and to try to persuade them to not destroy cultural artifacts. The Taliban minister of culture, an official in a government that had banned women from public life, reciprocated by dropping by to see her in Peshawar.
The Taliban nonetheless blew up the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan, the subject of one of Mrs. Dupree’s first writings on Afghanistan.
“She came into the office with tears in her eyes, and said ‘they destroyed the Buddhas,’ ” recalled Abdul Rahim Qadrdan, who began working with Mrs. Dupree in 1999 and now manages the collection at her center.
In her final years, Mrs. Dupree was overtaken by nostalgia for a lost Afghanistan, something she shares with many Afghans of her generation and even younger. Last July, she visited the office of Hamid Karzai, the former president.
“How are you, how are you?” Mr. Karzai asked her.
“I don’ t like feeling old, ” she responded, “But I would like to do more.”
During a conversation that lasted nearly an hour, Mrs. Dupree talked about the “terrible” blast walls that were popping up everywhere and ruining the city. And as Mr. Karzai sat at the edge of his seat and reached to help cut small bites out of a French pastry, Mrs. Dupree told him about the hilltop restaurant where she and Louis had gotten married. She was frustrated that younger Afghans did not even know that it had existed and wondered if Mr. Karzai could help in its restoration.
Mrs. Dupree is survived by a sister, Jane, three stepchildren and five grandchildren. Before her husband died of cancer, in 1989, he started archiving material about Afghanistan. Mrs. Dupree continued the work, eventually transferring the material to Kabul University, where it became the core of the Afghanistan Center.
On Sunday, the center was busy; at noon, about 85 people had logged into the visitor’s registry. A portrait of Mrs. Dupree, her white hair disheveled and a gray scarf around her neck, had been placed on her office desk.
Abdul Waheed Wafa, the director of the center, said Mrs. Dupree had resisted her doctors’ recommendations that she go to the United States for care. “Her home was Afghanistan, ” he said.
Mr. Wafa said that Mrs. Dupree was modest and only saw herself “as a helper for the community of researchers on Afghanistan, as someone who loved Afghanistan and its heritage.” She “desperately wanted” to introduce the Afghanistan that she came to know, in the 1960s and 1970s, before the Soviet occupation, the resistance, the Taliban, and the United States invasion.
“She would say, ‘Look, a lot of your young generation don’ t know how beautiful this country is, how beautiful the countryside of Afghanistan is, ” Mr. Wafa said.
Mrs. Dupree — who is survived by two stepdaughters, a stepson and several grandchildren — asked that her remains be buried on a Kabul hilltop, the Bagh-e-Bala, just down the steps from the restaurant where and her husband married. His ashes are buried there under a simple monument.
“He’s got such a fantastic view, ” Mrs. Dupree used to tell friends.
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