below left: the bazaar in Kultimurodinok madrassah, Khiva; trading and bartering for goods is no different today than a thousand years ago, but here the sellers occupy former shaded teach- ing niches and display local crafts carved, moulded, hooked, stitched and woven from within the preserved city right: a gateway of intersecting streets; Tok-i-Zargaron in Bukhara is one of three remaining gate- ways each dedicated as a bazaar to money-changers, cap makers, and in this case jewellers located under domes with exposed, unembellished structural ribs that seem both futuristic and photogenic
above: a mosque in the Hodja Arrar ensemble, Samarkand: many small mosques in this ensemble are dis- persed around the hauz; elaborately painted tapered columns and the per- forated ceramic screens embellish the aivan (study porch) at one entrance
Samarkand Through History Samarkand (known as Marakanda to the Greeks) was founded in the fifth century BC. It is one of Central Asia’s oldest settlements, located on the edge of the Khryzlkhum desert east of the Caspian Sea, nestled into the foothills of the Tian Shen and Fan Mountains, and situated north of the great Hindu Kush and Pamir mountain ranges. In 329 BC Alexander the Great from Macedonia conquered central Asia and married pretty Roxanna from Samarkand. At the crossroads of the great Silk Road between China, India, Persia and Italy, Samarkand grew to a city larger than the one we see today. From the sixth to thirteenth centuries it changed hands about every 100 years, occupied by Western Turks, Arabs, Persian Samanids, Karakhamids, Sejug Turks, Mongolian Karakitay and
Khorizmshaw. Amir Timur, born near Samarkand, a powerful tyrant and a grand patron of literature and the arts made it the capital of the Tamarlane empire by 1370. Timur and his grandson Uleg Beg (1400-1447) forged Samarkand into a new, magical, economic, cultural and intellectual epicentre with extraordinary fortress walls and gateways, mosques, madrassahs, minarets, mausoleums, palaces, bazaars, caravansaries (traveller’s inns) and an astronomical observatory. In 1868 the army of the Tsars of Russia arrived, constructing the Trans-Caspian Railway in 1888 as a fast link to Moscow. In 1924 Samarakand was declared, briefly, the capital of New Uzbekistan Soviet Socialist Republic, but in 1930 lost that honour to Tashkent.
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On Site review 20: archives and museums
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