This text is part of the special Pleasures notebook
Few people here think of putting Uzbekistan on their list for their next vacation. However, a fantasy of travel writers, a mythical city whose grandeur evokes that of Tamerlane and the Silk Road, the city of Samarkand includes some of the most flamboyant monumental sites on the globe, and it dazzles day and night. Third text in our Traveling differently series, on a destination that is off the beaten track.
“We hold our breath when barbarity transforms into splendor,” says Colin Thubron in The shadow of the Silk Roadtalking about the interior of the extraordinary Gur Emir, the mausoleum where the bloodthirsty conqueror Amir Timur, alias Tamerlane, rests.
Like all those who enter under the fluted dome of this masterpiece of Samarkand, the traveling writer no longer touches the ground and feels his soul drawn towards the heights, in this vast space lined with mineral lace, plant interlacing and of sublimely calligraphed extracts from the Koran. Better still: the radiant walls are covered in gold up to the top of the dome, which evokes the celestial vault so well that we end up believing that the beyond forms a golden Eden.
This monument alone could embody the power of Tamerlane’s empire. But throughout his conquests, from the Mediterranean to China, the ruthless Turkish-Mongol leader never stopped beautifying Samarkand. And if “Timur the Lame” left “towers and pyramids of cemented skulls of victims” on his battlefields, he was also very keen on the arts, letters and graceful large-scale structures. An esthete in a butcher’s body, in short.
Tamerlane’s capital
Founded in the 8the century BCE, taken by Alexander the Great in 329 BCE and razed by Genghis Khan in 1220, Samarkand became the capital of Tamerlane in 1369. In 35 years of reign, he made it the cultural and commercial epicenter of Central Asia, because in addition to being the capital of all the splendors of its time, Samarkand was located at the heart of the Silk Road, this network of routes which favored exchanges of all kinds between the East and West for over a millennium. Today, Samarkand is quite Turkish, a little Arab, vaguely Persian, slightly Chinese-Indian and totally Uzbek.
The flagship city of an extraordinary country, it also presents the face of a modern city which does not always lend itself to strolling, with its avenues sometimes laid out in Soviet style, sometimes a little too designed for tourism. On the other hand, it is very pleasant to explore its teeming markets (including the Syab Bazaar), and its UNESCO sites all deserve to be revered.
After the Gur Emir, you just have to walk through the Shah-e-Zindeh necropolis (“the sanctuary of the living king”) to be convinced of this. A veritable avenue of refined tombs, it has several mausoleums whose ornamentation is among the most finely crafted in the Muslim world.
Here, each door opens onto the tomb of a sister, a wife, a niece of Tamerlane, in so many small spaces surrounded by white glazed tiles – “as if they had been fertilized by a ray of moon,” says Thubron — or whose sparkling blue mosaics and olive green majolica give off a subtle interior light. At the end of these fabulous antechambers sits the tomb of Qassim ibn Abbas, Mohammed’s cousin. “This necropolis is the favorite site of most foreigners,” assures Akbar Kozakov, local guide.
In addition to having a weakness for the arts, Tamerlan showed a strong penchant for megalomania. You quickly realize this when you catch a stiff neck at the foot of its colossal Bibi-Khanoum mosque: built with the help of 95 elephants brought from India, it formed in its time (in 1404) the largest mosque on the planet. , with his iwan (porch) of 35 meters and its minarets of 50 meters. Despite its impressive majesty, it eventually collapsed after several earthquakes before being rebuilt by the Soviets in the 1970s.
From Tamerlane to Ulugh Beg
After the death of Tamerlane in 1405, his successors continued his work, as wealth and know-how were concentrated in Samarkand, nourished by the immensity of the Timurid empire. His grandson Ulugh Beg even transformed the city into an intellectual center by erecting, in 1420, the first of three madrasas (Koranic schools) which today form Registan, the most emblematic site in Uzbekistan.
With their iwans 50 meters high, their delirious ornamentations, their riots of mosaics and glazed tiles as well as their turquoise domes which touch the azure, these three gigantic constructions are flanked by imposing minarets which dare to want to support the sky. Inside one of them, the incomparable Tilla Hari mosque goes further: bathed in gold and midnight blue and dotted with a scattering of stars, it sparkles and dazzles beyond belief. more if it is the heavens which imitate it, or the reverse.
Set back from the main sites of Samarkand, Ulugh Beg has also left its mark. Returning from a military campaign in Baghdad, he was so impressed by the city’s observatory that he wanted to reproduce it. Today, only an immense quadrant measuring 30 meters reminds us that the astronomer prince succeeded in determining the position of a thousand stars.
But this observer of the night was soon a victim of the obscurantism of the fundamentalists of the time, who beheaded him because they found that he was too interested in the universe, and not enough in religion. It just goes to show that it’s not new that the madmen of God are harming the progress of science and humanity.
Fortunately, the City of Lights of Uzbekistan was able to survive all the darkness, all the great darkness, from yesterday to today.
The author was a guest of Turkish Airlines and Roads of the World.
This content was produced by the Special Publications team at Duty, relating to marketing. The writing of the Duty did not take part.