After a midnight arrival from Frankfurt, Nick awoke in Tashkent surrounded by utilitarian Soviet architecture and sixty-year-old street cars rumbling along tree-lined boulevards with fountains galore staving off the 40+ Celsius heat of a Central Asian summer. He eventually stumbled upon a few architectural gems hidden away in the backstreets, two madrassas highlighting the Islamic culture the Bolsheviks tried to erase: Kukeldesh Madrassa (1560), with a tile sun motif above its arch façade and Barak-Khan Madrassa (15th century) buried in a pre-Soviet shantytown of adobe-walled houses with wattle and daub roofing. The mosaic of tile and Arabic calligraphy on the Barak-Khan façade as it soared above surrounding adobe hovels was a time machine.
His focus were two Silk Road gems. After a jarring three-hour drive south over the Syr Darya River (that historically emptied into the Aral Sea, but due to massive irrigation rarely does, which is why the “sea” has evaporated almost to extinction) and across countless miles of cotton farms, the road finally climbed through a rocky defile in a finger of the Turkestan Range that extends from its snowy summits to the Kyzyl Kum desert. South of the defile and over the Zaravshan River, with its headwaters found in a range of the same name, soared the heaven-blue domes of Samarkand, just three hours from Dushanbe, Tajikistan.
“Suddenly we caught a glimpse of painted minarets trembling in the blue astringent light and the great Madonna blue domes of mosques and tombs shouldering the full weight of the sky among bright green trees and gardens.”
Laurens van der Post, Journey Into Russia, 1964
The Registan assemblage of madrassas is the most spectacular ensemble in Central Asia. Every square inch of the three structures is covered in a riot of mosaics. Its locale was where the brutal nomadic conquerer Tamerlane (Timur 1336-1405) stuck victims’ heads on spikes and where his people gathered to hear grandiose plans for future invasions in what was a bazaar in 1404. It wasn’t until 1417-1420 that the first madrassa, Ulugh Beg, commissioned by and named after Tamerlane’s belatedly famous astronomer grandson, was constructed. Nick was impressed such a structure had survived 600 years in an earthquake prone region. It’s obviously been reconstructed numerous times in various sections, but large swaths of original tile remain.
“…crumbling sun-baked bricks, decorated with glazed tiles of deep blue and vivid turquoise that sparkle in the sun…a walled stairway with, on either side, a row of small mosques of the most exquisite beauty…wainscotted with alabaster and adorned with jasper…glimpses of courtyards and gardens…and in the open bazaars great heaps of fruit…”
Fitzroy Maclean, Eastern Approaches, 1949.
One of the vendors with a stall inside the old student quarters of Ulugh Beg offered to escort Nick up the leaning northern minaret. With no light inside and brick chunks littering the stairway, he felt carefully with feet and hands in the pitch black for a path up the spiral stairs. Toward the top filtered light guided him up an increasingly claustrophobic stairwell.
At the pinnacle, standing on a step to rise through corrugated tin protecting the spire from rain damage, was a superb view, not only of the other two madrassas that make up the Registan, Sher Dor (1619-35) with its striped-lions-chasing-deer-tile-motif and Tilla Kari (1646-1659) built from the ruins of a historic Silk Road caravanserai, but also of the massive turquoise dome of Bibi Khanym Mosque (1399-1404) towering above the adobe-brown oasis, built by Tamerlane’s wife to welcome him home from his India Campaign of 1398-99. An observer wrote of this mosque on completion: “Its dome would have been unique had it not been for the heavens, and unique would have been its portal had it not been for the Milky Way.”
The view from Ulugh Beg reminded Nick of the minaret view over Old Delhi and Red Fort from the spires of Jama Masjid Mosque (commissioned in 1650 by Shah Jahan, one of Tamerlane’s Mughal descendants), yet was more primitive due to the tidy size of Samarkand as it hunkers down beside foothills ascending to the Pamir and Tien Shan mountains rising east to well over 20,000’. Traveling from Xian, the origin of the Silk Road, to Samarkand, its major caravanserai in the west over a two month period, presented him with quite the perspective.
When Tamerlane died on the eve of the 1405 invasion of Ming Dynasty China, he was buried in the mausoleum built for the grandson who died fighting in Turkey in 1403. Inside, under a towering, ribbed, cantaloupe dome 100’ high, sits his death wish: “only a stone with my name on it”; only the stone with his name carved on it is one of the largest chunks of jade in the world. A Persian invader tried to carry the piece away in 1740, but dropped it, splitting it in half. Rather than reap the bad luck of such an accident, the stone was promptly returned to one of the world’s most beautiful mausoleums (the Taj Mahal, also commissioned by Shah Jahan was begun in 1632). Its high corners with distinctive stalactite ornamentation (muqarnas) combine with blue and gold geometric patterns and gold leaf of the dome to create a stunning architectural achievement for one of the great conquerors of history, his Timurid Empire having stretched from the Mediterranean to Delhi.
His grandson Ulugh Beg was more interested in studying the universe than conquering the planet. He built an observatory enclosing a giant sextant on Kukhak Hill, the highest point in Samarkand, making it the best-equipped observatory of the medieval world. Due to its progressive scientific analyses, the observatory represented heretical thought to Islamic fundamentalists. The motto of Ulugh’s teacher Kazi Rumi were fighting words: “Where knowledge starts religion ends,” so the observatory’s existence was a precarious one.
Ulugh’s astronomical discoveries put him on a par with Copernicus and Kepler, yet his calculations didn’t become known to the world until 1648, when a copy of his Catalog of Stars was discovered at Oxford. He plotted the position of the solar system and 1,018 stars, and calculated the length of the year to within 58 seconds. He paid for such insights with his life. His own son decapitated him for such unorthodox discoveries in 1449.
One of the crowning achievements of Central Asian architecture is the Sha-i-Zinda Ensemble, a long street of exquisite mausoleums housing the remnants of Tamerlane’s intimates from the late 1300s and early 1400s. The various structures and their remaining panels of tile mosaics could be the most exquisite collection of such antiquity in the world. There are Chinese influences, with landscape mosaics of foliage and perched birds, rivers and clouds, while others are traditionally Islamic with faience panels decorated with flowers, calligraphy, and abstract designs bordered by bands of raised mosaic and terra-cotta complexity. What remains is in near perfect (renovated) condition after 600 years. What this walk was like when the walls were completely covered with blue and white-tiled intensity must have been heavenly.
Back in Tashkent Nick hopped a flight aboard an ancient Yak 40 to another Silk Road gem, Bukhara, flying in true Soviet style: seat backs broken, bins hanging open, no assigned seats and everyone smoking. Bukhara reached its zenith some one thousand years after Christ, with a population of 300,000, 250 madrassas, a multitude of caravanserai, a library holding 45,000 titles, and the Samanid Empire covering present day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and large portions of Afghanistan and Iran. When Genghis Khan rode into town with his thundering horde, he reportedly entered the Kalyan mosque, brushed a Koran from its wooden holder (rehal) onto the ground and cried out, “The hay is cut, give your horses fodder,” which his troops interpreted as slaughter all and raze the city, which they did. They left only the Kalyan minaret, built in 1127 to a height of 150’ sitting on a 30’ foundation with 14 bands of kufic calligraphy circling its slender majesty, still standing. The reason it remains is because Genghis himself was impressed, gazing upon it with a “finger to his mouth in a curious token of amazement.” In retrospect it’s obvious he knew he could put it to good use, such as throwing people off of its heights, which he and later rulers did for centuries, earning the moniker “death tower” for this beacon of the Kyzyl Kum desert. The tallest structure in Central Asia when it was built, the tower with its turquoise necklace of glazed brick offers the climber the best perspective of this crossroads of the Silk Route, particularly the Po-i-Kalyan ensemble it rises from: The Kalyan mosque built in the 12th century but destroyed by the Mongols, then rebuilt in 1514-15 as the Mir-i-Arab (1535) madrassa.
The Kalyan mosque is massive, almost on the same scale as the Bibi Khanym in Samarkand (the largest in Central Asia), with the Mir-i-Arab across the courtyard one of only two madrassas in the entire Soviet Union to have remained open. It’s still open, and some 120-130 students study Islamic law, literature and Arabic. From atop the minaret the blue domes of the ensemble below, coupled with broad mosaic façades of many mosques and madrassas rising from the mud streets and adobe houses across the ancient oasis, takes the visitor back 800 years.
In the northwest corner of town, not far from the Kalyan ensemble, lies the Ark, a 2,000-year-old fortress that’s had its walls reconstructed after years of neglect. Who originally built in this place isn’t known, but the Arabs first destroyed it in the 8th century, the Samanids rebuilt it in the 10th, Genghis and company destroyed it in the 13th, then the Shaybanids rebuilt it in the 16th when it became a city within a city for multiple Emirs. The Bolsheviks finally destroyed it in the 1920s in a final attempt to drive the last Emir, Alim Khan, from power. It’s also infamous in the West for its jail, the Zindan, also known as the Bug Pit, just outside the towering walls.
In an 1839 chess move of the Great Game, a British Lieutenant Colonel arrived in Bukhara on a mission to secure Emir Nasrullah as an ally, but things went wrong from the start: Charles Stoddart rode into the Ark when only the Emir is allowed to do so, he walked toward Emir Nasrullah when he should have crawled, then presented a letter not from the Queen, but from the Governor General of India. Incensed, the Emir tossed him into the Bug Pit, a 20’ deep brick well crawling with rats, scorpions, cockroaches and ticks. Stoddart was in its depths for six months, facing execution if he did not convert to Islam. He converted and received clean clothes, housing, and the freedom to wander the labyrinthine streets, not to mention a circumcision.
A few years later a colleague, Captain Arthur Conolly of the Bengal Light Infantry, came to rescue Stoddart. Unfortunately for both, the British had just been massacred retreating to India from the First Anglo-Afghan War (the Disaster in Afghanistan), with one survivor left alive to tell the tale. Nasrullah got word of this military disaster and promptly sent both Brits to the Bug Pit. The Emir then offered Conolly mercy if he converted to Islam, but seeing his colleague was no better off for having done so, refused. They were both executed in the large square in front of the Ark’s magnificent gatehouse and buried nearby.
Old Bukhara is a washed-out brown, but the multicolored façades of its madrassas with robin-egg-blue domes and complex ceilings found in mosques hidden along muddy lanes with intricately carved wooden columns supporting interior paintings of flowers in vases framed by alabaster reliefs of Islamic motifs, exhibit an artistry of the highest order amidst the bleak Kyzyl Kum desert.
Nick’s favorite structure was also one of the oldest in Central Asia, dating from 907 CE: the Ismail Samani Mausoleum. What makes this mausoleum unique, despite the fact three generations of Samanis were buried there over a thousand years ago, is its composed of pre-Islamic brick techniques, pushing creativity of that most utilitarian of building materials to outrageous extremes. Built from clay bricks made of egg yolks and camel milk, they are arranged in a basket weave of varying textures through different sections of the structure. The mausoleum rises from an ancient depression in Samani Park, while the remains of a forty-mile fortress wall that has encircled the oasis town since the 9th century crumbles in the distance: 30’ high and made of adobe blocks, there is not much left, but the last of eleven massive gates still stands. In a meditative glance he was transported back a thousand years to when one of the great centers of civilization was in the Central Asian desert.
Uzbekistan has more recently become a sanctuary for soldiers fleeing the “Graveyard of Empires” next door, Afghanistan. Soviet troops retreated across the Friendship Bridge over the Amu Darya River between the two countries in 1989 while U.S. allies did the same 32 years later in August 2021 after the Taliban victory, with Afghan National Army pilots also landing 22 jets and 24 helicopters in Termez, Uzbekistan to escape the onslaught. Surrounded by five other Central Asian nations, Uzbekistan is not only a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which includes powerhouses Russia and China, but will be a pivot point in the latter’s New Silk Road (the Belt and Road Initiative launched eight years ago by Xi Jinping) ensuring Eurasian integration. Past is prologue for Uzbekistan as it assumes the Chairmanship of the SCO from Tajikistan this month and becomes a cross-cultural crossroads once again.
© 2021 James B. Angell All Rights Reserved