Live Your Legacy. Tell Your Tale. Heirlooms for an Untamed Heart.
Live Your Legacy. Tell Your Tale. Heirlooms for an Untamed Heart.
Yaadgāri was born from a question: How do you hold onto a place you inherited, but only knew in your heart?
For Yaadgāri founder and designer Ferishta Sahar, it began with a small handful of deep blue lapis pendants gifted to her by her parents from their homeland.
As a first-generation Afghan American, Afghanistan was at once familiar and distant, a homeland carried through family stories, fragments of memory, and the objects brought home from across the world.
Its regal, intoxicating blue like a window into somewhere both distant and eternal; a night sky scattered with ancient stars, or the deep, everlasting flow of the Amu Darya. It held the liveliness of rugged mountains, ancient cities, and landscapes of a land she had heard about long before she could fully understand it or see it.
They became her first yaadgāri. Her first keepsake.
Growing up in America, Ferishta encountered Afghanistan through a complicated lens. Yet, the stories she sensed within her own heritage spoke of something far older and far richer.
Years later, a visit to the Hidden Treasures of Afghanistan exhibition in New York City transformed fascination into pursuit.
Surrounded by recovered ancient jewelry and artifacts, she encountered a realm that was strangely intimate. The pieces were regal, intricate, and unmistakably alive with the energy of the those who once wore them, and the artistry of those who had made them. Like a record of human lives, a reflection of identity, memory, place, and passage through time.
Something shifted. She began Searching
Ferishta immersed herself in the worlds of gems, jewelry, ancient goldsmithing traditions, and the histories of Afghanistan and Central Asia. She sought out books and archives, epic tales of the past and stories in the present
But alongside beauty, there was always shadow.
Even a visit to Kabul, where much of her family’s history is rooted, carried this tension—the feeling of standing within a place that held immense beauty and history, while knowing how much had been lost and how much remained beyond reach.
Yaadgāri grew from that search.
Rather than attempting to recreate the past, Ferishta began asking how its fragments might be carried forward. Her work brings together the worlds she inherited and the world she grew up in—East and West, memory and modernity, history and imagination.
Each growing from a fragment. A landscape, an ancient motif, a gemstone, a forgotten detail, a story, or simply a feeling left behind by a place.
These fragments are reimagined as contemporary heirlooms—jewelry designed not to belong to one particular era, but to carry something of the past into the present, our tales through time.
History is often preserved not only in artifacts but in the stories we tell, each Yaadgāri collection is accompanied by an original tale inspired by the people, places, landscapes, and spirit of the region.
Yaadgāri means keepsake—something held onto because it carries memory.
That idea sits at the heart of everything Ferishta creates.
Through Yaadgāri, she hopes to illuminate the richness and complexity of a heritage that deserves to be remembered in its fullness—not only through the histories that have been written, but through the beauty, artistry, poetry, landscapes, and human stories that have endured.
The jewelry is an invitation to remember.
To discover. To carry something forward. And, ultimately, to make it your own.
Because a keepsake does not end with the person who first holds it. It gathers meaning as it moves through generations, becoming part of another person’s story. It is truly never finished.
America is home. Afghanistan is heart.
Yaadgāri is the place where the two meet.
“I invite you into my world of expression, in which I hope you will find a keepsake of your own.”
— Ferishta Sahar
Founder & Designer, Yaadgāri