Big, bigger, Timurid (Samarkand)

The third of the big Silk Road cities on my trip through Uzbekistan was Samarkand and this one was the biggest of all. Known as Makaranda to the Greeks, Alexander the Great declared that “everything I have heard about Marakanda is true, except that it’s more beautiful than I ever imagined.” He then went on to sack it.

But its main claim to fame today is as the seat of power of the Timurid empire. Central Asia suffered the depredations of two bloodthirsty warlords in a little over a century. First it was Genghis Khan and the Mongols laying waste to the great cities of Central Asia in the thirteenth century. Then, in the late fourteenth century, Timur (aka Tamerlane) went on a rampage that established an empire stretching from the Black Sea to the edge of present-day China and from Egypt to Delhi. He fell ill and died in 1405 just as he was preparing an invasion of China.

 

Unlike Genghis Khan, Timur was a local boy and a Muslim, born in Shakhrisabz, a couple hours’ drive south of Samarkand. That didn’t make him any more merciful to his neighbours. Timur’s name has become a byword for brutality. Cities that showed any resistance to his conquests were put to the sword—every last man, woman, and child. In Esfahan, the cultural heart of Iran, somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people were massacred and Timur instructed his army to build pyramids of their skulls.

 

Despite the barbarity, Timur was also a patron of culture, supporting intellectuals and poets like Ibn Khaldun and Hafez and ushering in what has been called the Timurid Renaissance. Samarkand bears stunning evidence of the more constructive aspects of his rule and its monuments are very well preserved. That’s the upside to being the capital of the last guy who went around wrecking everything.

 

Following the breakup of the Timurid Empire, which lasted barely over a century, Samarkand declined in importance. During the Great Game period in the nineteenth century, Samarkand was a backwater under the sway of Bukhara. But it’s had another renaissance in the twentieth century, and the Soviets were zealous in their restoration work. Like in Khiva, you see the city in the sparkling glory of its heyday almost to a fault: what you see is more a reworking of the original than the original itself.

 

The Samarkand synagogue

 

Travelling from Bukhara to Samarkand, I got to take the Afrosiyob “bullet train,” which makes the journey in less than two hours. To be honest, it was more like a bullet shot out of a nerf gun—none of the uncanny whizzing landscape you get in true high-speed rail—but the seats were comfortable and the whole thing was clearly set up for the business travel set. Upsides included free WiFi onboard. Downsides included the fact that the WiFi didn’t work.

 

Samarkand was a balmy 35° during my visit, which was positively tepid by the standards of my Uzbekistan visit so far. Still important to hydrate, though. The first shop where I bought a bottle of water, the guy asked me where I was from, and when I said Canada, he responded enthusiastically with “Wayne Gretzky!” Hockey is not a big sport in Uzbekistan—he told me that there is a team in Tashkent, the capital, but not in Samarkand—but he remembered watching during the Soviet years and lit up when I mentioned Tretiak and Kharlamov.

 

If you read my last entry on Bukhara, you’ll recall that Bukhara was once home to a large Jewish community. Samarkand also had a significant population of Bukharan Jews and, like Bukhara, those numbers have dwindled since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But unlike in Bukhara, I was able to visit the synagogue in Samarkand.

 

Instead of a police guard, I found only a man in late middle age wearing a kippah sitting outside the synagogue entrance. It turns out this was the rabbi, Iosif (I felt I was in good standing with him when I introduced myself as David), and he showed me around the synagogue.

 

The tour was in Russian so my reporting of the facts might be a little off, but I gather there remain only about a hundred Jews in Samarkand, twenty of them Bukharan and the remaining eighty Ashkenazi. Iosif showed me a grand nineteenth century Talmud that had been published in Poland—apparently two thousand Polish Jews fled to Samarkand in 1944, which is why the Ashkenazi population today outnumbers the local Bukharans.

 

The synagogue was small but lovingly maintained. In keeping with the ornately carved woodwork I’ve seen elsewhere in Uzbekistan, the doors and cabinets had elegant geometrical designs, these ones incorporating the star of David.

 

Interior of the Samarkand synagogue

A nineteenth century Polish Talmud

The Shah-i Zinda

 

I stopped in at the synagogue on my way to the Shah-i Zinda, a mausoleum complex that allegedly began as the gravesite of Qutham ibn Abbas, a cousin of Muhammad’s, who brought Islam to Central Asia (with the help of a large army). Timur and his urbane grandson Ulugbek both had members of their family buried in this auspicious place, so it’s now a densely packed arcade of mausolea. It may also be the most beautiful place I’ve seen in Uzbekistan.

 

To enter the Shah-i Zinda, you climb a flight of stone steps and pass through an archway and then find yourself in an alley lined on both sides with mausoleum buildings fronted with exquisite blue tilework. Things open up a bit farther along, culminating in some of the older mausolea, including that of Qutham ibn Abbas, at the far end.

 

The narrow alley near the entrance of the Shah-i Zinda

The more open space farther along the Shah-i Zinda

The interiors are in various stages of restoration, which allows an intriguing view of how these structures are put together. Some are fully decked out in tiles, some have decorative paint to the plaster, and a few have only white plaster on the walls. And one or two had interiors of plain brick without plaster. Looking at these, I could see that the muqarnas—the projected tiers of niche-like elements—aren’t built into the brickwork itself but are plaster mouldings that are built on top of a less elaborate base of brick.

 

But it was the tilework on the interiors and exteriors that really made me gasp. This was Timurid craftsmanship at its finest. Every individual tile was intricately decorated, and each one was then into a much larger and more elaborate whole. Such an exceptional level of detail and yet all of it harmoniously fitting together.

 

The Shah-i Zinda was also my first taste of tourist overcrowding in Central Asia. Especially in Khiva, I was surprised at how quiet the streets were. Not here. Partly owing to the narrow passageway, and of course partly owing to its exceptional beauty, the Shah-i Zinda was clogged with admirers, each wanting to get their perfect photos.

 

I was one of those photo takers and I decided to pay the entrance fee a second time (about $5, so no big deal) on my last morning in Samarkand to try to catch it without the crowds. The woman I spoke to at the ticket desk told me it opened at eight but I was clearly misinformed because I arrived a few minutes after eight to find the place already busy with tourists. The early morning crowd was clearly there for the photos, and lots of woman in flowing clothes were directing their boyfriends on how best to capture them against this exotic backdrop.

 

I shouldn’t be annoyed at the photo takers since I was one of them but the narcissism puts me off a bit. Lots of attempts to get photographed looking pensively at a structure of great beauty and then moving on once the photo is taken, the pensive look a mere pretence. The Shah-i Zinda was a backdrop to their own beauty rather than something to admire for its own sake. That said, my own merely aesthetic pleasure in the place probably seemed off to the Uzbek visitors, for whom this was a place of great religious significance.

 

I was not alone in admiring the Shah-i Zinda

Going big: Bibi Khanym Mosque and the Registan

 

Megalomaniacs from Timur to Donald Trump tend to be of the view that size matters. To his credit, Timur funded the construction of buildings that are on a totally different aesthetic plane than any of Trump’s towers. Dedicated to Timur’s Chinese wife, the Bibi Khanym mosque is absolutely immense, especially by fourteenth century standards, with a cupola 41m high and an entrance portal 38m high. In case you’re wondering whether there’s any benefit to plundering the riches of India, here’s your answer.

The Bibi Khanym mosque

To be honest, the bigness of Bibi Khanym was its most striking feature. It had elaborate tilework too, but nothing quite so exquisite as at the Shah-i Zinda, and in general, the aesthetic aim seemed primarily to overawe you with its size.

 

Also Very Big but with aesthetic merit in spades is the Registan, the jewel in the crown of Silk Road travel. The Registan is a complex of three big madrassas, the earliest of them built under Ulugbek in the fifteenth century and the other two dating from the seventeenth.

 

Registan Square

Where the Bibi Khanym mosque is just one big monument to bigness, the Registan is broken up into more harmonious parts: the three separate madrassas, all facing onto a central square, and then within each madrassa there are separate chambers, mosques, and courtyards. As a result, you get the impression of a constantly unfolding series of wonders rather than being overawed all in one go. I spent several minutes gaping at the pishtak, or entrance portal, to one of the madrassas only to realize that, once I step through, I enter onto a courtyard with yet more wonders upon wonders.

The facade of the Sher Dor madrassa

Inside the Sher Dor madrassa

Pushing right up to the limit of over-the-top is the mosque of the central Tilla-Kari madrassa, decked out in blue and gold paint, with warm yellow lighting to enhance the effect. This interior is on the cover of my Lonely Planet: Central Asia guidebook and it does do a pretty good job of announcing that this part of the world has some treats in store.

The ceiling is actually flat but it looks domed because of the tapering concentric leaf patterns. I would have assumed it was a dome if my Lonely Planet hadn’t informed me otherwise.

 

The third of the three madrassas—actually the first in terms of date of construction but the third in terms of my visit—was the one built by Ulugbek, whose name you might recall from an earlier blog post as a scholar-statesman who funded a massive astronomical observatory. Fittingly, his madrassa—in which he allegedly taught mathematics—is decked out with stars on its entrance pishtak.

The facade of the Ulugbek madrassa

When I entered, a guy semi-surreptitiously asked if I’d like to go to the top of the minaret. I’m not sure what the deal here was, but it was questionably licit and definitely dodgy. I passed some other tourists coming down as I came up—I think the guy in charge of the minaret does some side business by ferrying tourists up one at a time. And it was definitely a one-at-a-time kind of a thing. Some dusty, bare rooms led to a vertiginous spiral staircase that ultimately emerged onto an open space just wide enough for me to fit my body through a gap in the metal roof sheeting around waist height. I’m not sure the view was worth the $10 the guy asked of me but I suppose when in Rome and all.

 

At the top of the minaret of the Ulugbek madrassa

The sketchy spiral staircase in the minaret

Shakhrisabz day trip

 

In addition to seeing Samarkand itself, I understood it was worth making a trip out to Shakhrisabz, where Timur was born. Organizing the trip turned out to be trickier than I’d imagined. In Tbilisi or Yerevan, you can’t turn over a stone without finding a tour company that’s eager to book you onto a minibus touring some of the nearby sites. There was nothing like that in Samarkand and looking online I mostly found offers of private drivers that would cost over $100.

 

The cheap option would have been to take a taxi, and near the Registan there’s a gaggle of taxi drivers that do that taxi driver equivalent of cat-calling whenever you walk by, calling out “taxi” and “Shakhrisabz” and even “Bukhara” and “Khiva” as well as “Seven Lakes” for a region in nearby Tajikistan. If you can negotiate a fair price (which I imagine is not the first thing these taxi touts would offer), you can apparently get a trip to Shakhrisabz and back with an hour or so waiting time in between for about $50.

 

My hotel in Samarkand was run by a guy who looked about twenty, with a few younger assistants who didn’t speak a word of English (or Russian). The guy in charge was resourceful and eager to please but also overworked, making himself available at almost all hours. I asked him about a trip to Shakhrisabz hoping the hotel had some connection with a tour company that could help me join a group for cheap. It seemed there was a possibility of a trip with one other person but I’d have to wait to confirm.

 

On the morning of my intended trip to Shakhrisabz, the young guy at my hotel told me that there wasn’t a second person who would join the trip but he could arrange a private tour for $80. This seemed to split the difference between a taxi and a normal private tour, so I agreed.

 

My driver and guide was Akram, a pudgy, baby-faced man of twenty-eight who’d recently shaved a thick beard that I imagine made him look older. He said his family and friends had all been telling him to shave it. In this part of the world, a thick beard is a marker of Islamism, and in a part of the world that’s acquainted with Islamist terror, bearded men can draw the suspicion of the government, so most Uzbek men I’ve met are clean-shaven.

 

We were joined for the drive by Akram’s younger nephew-in-law, who’d recently returned to Uzbekistan after a year in Istanbul studying tourism. This nephew had overstayed his visa and been deported but he seemed to intend to return again to Turkey. Akram had brought him along to show him the ropes of tour guiding.

 

I don’t think I learned anything about Shakhrisabz on the trip that I hadn’t learned about in more precise detail from my guidebook. The guide aspect of the trip was less of an education about Shakhrisabz and more an education about economic hunger in Uzbekistan. We were barely underway before Akram asked me what I liked to eat, how I liked Uzbek food, and then explained how he organizes cooking classes that give tourists an authentic view of Uzbek village life. He returned to this theme several times on the trip while also offering me several other side trip and alternative tour options. Actually telling me about the place we were going to visit was a much lower priority. He also asked me how much people earn in Canada and how people get visas to work there and mentioned that he was hoping to build his own hotel and just needed to find someone (with a gentle hint that I could be that someone) to invest $50,000 to get it off the ground.

 

Shakhrisabz is a two-hour drive from Samarkand across a low mountain pass, which was the first break in the relentlessly flat Uzbek landscape I’d seen so far. We drove out in Akram’s Chevrolet sedan, one of hundreds on the road. Chevrolet has a monopoly on the domestic manufacture of automobiles in Uzbekistan so almost every vehicle you see on the road is a chevvy or the cute little Damas minivans, which are apparently an Uzbekistan special made by the same Chevrolet plant. You see the occasional import vehicle but these are usually fancier cars for rich folk.

 

Dave, one half of the Australian couple I’d visited the Aral Sea with, had been in Uzbekistan ten years earlier and remarked on how much had changed. Back then it was mostly old Russian cars on the roads. You still see a fair number of beat-up Ladas. They don’t have a reputation for being great at standard car things like driving and not breaking down, but they do have a jaunty charm to them—high suspension, front and back angled slightly outward, and high roofs.

 

All of this has been a lengthy prologue to a somewhat underwhelming visit. Shakhrisabz’s central landmarks have been corralled into an overly manicured central park with a towering statue of Timur in the middle. He’s obviously a complicated character historically, and not regarded as a hero by many, but since Uzbekistan’s independence in 1991 he’s become an emblem of Uzbek national pride. It was only after seeing his statue in Shakhrisabz that I realized that the statue in central Samarkand of Islam Karimov—Karimov was Uzbekistan’s first post-Soviet president, who took after Timur in terms of authoritarian ambition if not territorial expansion—was clearly modelled on Timur’s.

 

Statue of Timur in Shakhrisabz

Statue of Islam Karimov in Samarkand--spot the resemblance?

The main site worth seeing in Shakhrisabz is the Oq Saroy, or white palace, which was once Timur’s summer palace. Unlike the monuments in Samarkand, this one has been allowed to succumb to the ravages of time. The palace itself is now gone with only part of the monumental entrance arch remaining. This stands at 35m high and at its top you only start to get an indication of the arch that would have completed it. Crumbling blue tilework still adorns what remains of the arch.

 

The crumbling entrance gate, which once would have been an arch, is all that remains of the Oq Saroy

The palace itself must have been mind-boggling. In the far distance of the photo above you can see the statue of Timur. That stands at what was apparently once the centre of the palace. Timur was not one for half-measures, either in terms of bloodlust or architectural ambition.

 

Timur was meant to be buried in Shakhrisabz but he died in the winter when the mountain passes made it inaccessible from Samarkand so he was buried in Samarkand instead. Mausolea on the far side of Shakhrisabz’s central park hold the graves of some of Timur’s family but not the man himself.

 

Back in Samarkand by late afternoon, I went to visit Timur’s actual resting place, the Gur Emir Mausoleum. I took a bit of a detour to find it because I’d put “Gur Emir” into Google Maps and it gave me “Gur Emir Palace” so I headed there figuring that was the place. Turns out it was a hotel on a side street about a five-minute walk from the mausoleum. A hotel that clearly has a good SEO game.

 

The mausoleum thankfully does not try to overawe the visitor with its bigness—possibly thanks to the fact that Timur didn’t plan to be buried there—but it does stand alongside the Shah-i Zinda, the Bibi Khanym mosque, and the Registan as an instance of the finest Timurid architecture in Samarkand. The exterior and the entrance portal are especially attractive, while the mausoleum—which marks the resting place of Timur as well as his revered teacher and two of his sons and grandsons—overdoes it a bit with the gold paint.

 

An Uzbek cooking class

 

Akram didn’t impress me all that much as a tour guide but I decided to take him up on his offer of a cooking class. This seemed to be the thing he was actually interested in doing and, for my part, I’d spent most of the last week taking photos of tourist attractions so I figured I should try to have an “authentic” experience for a change. Besides, I had to eat lunch somewhere.

 

Akram lives in a village a little outside Samarkand. He lists his culinary class on Tripadvisor and explained to me that he sets certain ground rules for visitors like “no nudity” because life in the village is more traditional. I’m pretty sure by “nudity” he meant women in shorts and tank tops. Either that or I missed out on the wilder side of urban life in Uzbekistan.

 

I’d explained to Akram the previous day that I was vegetarian, which generally is not a popular dietary choice in this part of the world, but he was able to accommodate it. The plan was to make samsa, which are larger, fried stuffed pastries (I’m guessing etymologically and culinarily related to samosa), and manti, which are smaller, steamed dumplings. I’ve had veggie manti in Uzbekistan but both are typically stuffed with meat. The plan for the day was to make zucchini and fried veggie samsa and pumpkin manti.

 

It turns out the culinary brains behind this operation is Akram’s wife Rushana. She was a little shy at first about this random foreigner in her kitchen but gradually livened up to what I assume is her sprightly norm. After lots of grating, and Rushana frying up some vegetables, we got down to the main event of folding food into pastries.

 

I’m generally a pretty lazy cook and avoid doing anything that requires manual dexterity so I’ve never made anything dumpling-like before. The prospect of doing so here was one of the main draws for me. The samsa dough was pre-made—it involves flaky layers that require a bit more work—but Rushana had made the dough for the manti herself. Following her lead, I rolled the samsa dough out into flat discs, which were then pinched together into a triangle with the filling in the middle. The manti were more fun. I’d pinch two opposite corners together, then the other two opposite corners, and then loop together two of the sides. The samsa went in the oven and the manti went in a steam cooker.

 

I was a bit alarmed that Akram and Rushana entrusted me with so much dumpling folding, considering lunch would be ruined if I screwed it up, but it went fairly well. I learned that the dough is quite sticky, so that, with a bit of pressing, you can get bits of dough to stick together snugly. I thought I was getting a knack for it until Rushana joined me to finish off some of the manti folding, zipping together five in the time it took me to do one. None of the manti were a total mess but it wasn’t hard for me to guess who folded the most tightly wrapped ones.

 

And it culminated in a delicious feast that was accompanied with melon and watermelon and bread and various other things I didn’t want to overdo so as to enjoy as many of my culinary co-creations as possible. We were joined partway through the meal by a trainee dentist who’s interning with Akram’s dentist brother.

 

Folding manti

From left to right: Akram, Akram's brother's dental intern, Rushana

After lunch, Akram drove me back to Samarkand and dropped me not far from my hotel. I had a night train to catch that night to Termez so I’d left my bags at the hotel but wanted to spend the afternoon doing a little shopping and then sitting in a shady café catching up with email and this damn blog (that was where I finished the Bukhara missive).

 

I’d had a really pleasant few hours at Akram’s home and the whole visit had been genial so I was a bit confused when we parted that Akram didn’t return my warmth and friendliness but instead shook hands a bit awkwardly. It only dawned on me five minutes later when I got a text from him: I’d forgotten to pay him for the cooking class! We’d agreed on a price the previous day but then he felt too embarrassed to ask me for payment when he dropped me off in the car. In his text, he simply wrote, “sorry for asking but we were expecting some money at least for the expenses.” I felt deeply embarrassed and called him to tell him I’d meet him back where he dropped me off five minutes before. When I saw him, I was full of apologies and so was he, saying he didn’t know how to ask me for the money. I ended up adding some extra for the trouble I’d caused.