Kalon to kalon (Bukhara)
I was fortunate to find myself alone in my train compartment when I boarded but that changed after half an hour when a pair of French-Turkish sisters discovered that they’d accidentally booked the bunk seats in a car with a large Uzbek family and asked me if they could join me in my compartment. The conversation was jolly enough—they were born and raised in France but spoke fluent Turkish and were fascinated to learn that I was living there and learning Turkish—but I’d also hoped to make some headway on my blog writing on the train. There was a bit of a pattern where they’d ask me a question, I’d get drawn into chatting with them, then they’d notice my computer had been open and I’d been typing, they’d apologize and tell me that they’d let me get back to work, and then five minutes later one of them would ask me another question and the cycle would repeat. And really the conversation was enjoyable and I’d have felt a bit churlish to tell them I was simply writing a diary so I just rolled with it.
Getting my bearings in Bukhara
I’d been told that Bukhara had some of the nicest guesthouses in Central Asia so it might be worth splashing out just a little to enjoy one of them. And indeed, for $60 I got one of the swankiest hotel stays of my admittedly unswanky life. My room felt very Silk Road chic and the nineteenth century dining room where I had breakfast felt like the sort of place tourists would pay just to look at.
My hotel room in Bukhara 
Where I had breakfast
Dave, Sam, and I had all benefitted from our orienting walking tour of Khiva so Dave suggested we repeat the experience in Bukhara. He’d asked the hotel he’d booked if they could arrange a walking tour for us on our first morning.
They could indeed but this walking tour was a bit of a disaster. There was something generally sketchy about the hotel Dave and Sam had booked and the “guide” who led us around was also the young, pimply guy who seemed to run the hotel. He spoke barely any English, spent more time looking at his phone than talking to us, and provided no information that I couldn’t have got more clearly and efficiently by just walking around on my own with my Lonely Planet in hand.
Luckily I had a bit more time in Bukhara—two and a half days rather than the one and a half I’d booked in Khiva—so it was fine to get my bearings from this desultory tour and plan to return to each of the places we’d looked at on my own time.
Unlike Khiva, Bukhara feels like a real place, but one with a lot of history. The old city is a narrow maze of alleys lined with protected buildings, many of which now double as atmospheric hotels. The main landmarks feel more venerable and subdued than either Khiva or Samarkand, both of which feel a little gussied up to please the tourists.
The alleys of the old city open up onto the Lab-i Hauz, a central plaza built around a pool that has fountains and a little floating pavilion where ducks and swans hang out. The perimeter of the pool is lined with restaurant seating, which makes for a very pleasant spot to spend an hour.
Pre-Mongol Bukhara
The Bukhara landmark that most won my heart was the Kalon minaret, a twelfth century structure with horizontal bands of patterned brick for decoration rather than the blue-and-white tilework that I’ve become accustomed to in this part of the world. And it’s not only my heart it won: it’s so beautiful it stayed even Genghis Khan’s hand. While he was laying waste to Bukhara—and killing 160,000 Bukharans in a week—he declared the Kalon minaret so fine that it should be spared from the general destruction. As a result, it’s the most prominent surviving pre-Mongol structure in this part of the world. It’s just a coincidence that the name is so similar to the Greek word for the beautiful, to kalon, but the echo seemed apt. (Or maybe it’s not a coincidence—the name means “great minaret” and Persian and Greek are both Indo-European languages.)
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| The kalon minaret with the entrance to its adjoining mosque |
The minarets in Central Asia tend to be stouter than the Ottoman minarets I’m familiar with in Istanbul. Those rise like bayonets above mosques above a series of domes that give the impression of solidity and balance, with harmonious proportions between the central dome and smaller surrounding ones. The Central Asian mosques tend to have only a single minaret—compared with the four that are the norm in Istanbul—and the mosque tends to have a single dome that’s taller than the low-slung Ottoman domes and slightly onion-shaped.
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| View from the Ark over old Bukhara. From left to right: Abdul Aziz Khan madrassa, Kalon minaret, and Kalon mosque |
The dome on the right side of the picture above belongs to the attached Kalon Mosque, which, unlike the minaret, is a post-Mongol (sixteenth century) structure built to replace the one the Mongols sacked. It’s gorgeous too, with a spacious central courtyard, but it also very much fits within a Timurid aesthetic of lavish blue-and-white tilework. (Timurid, by the way, refers to the empire founded by Timur in the fourteenth century, and which lasted into the sixteenth—more on him in the next blog post.) The minaret is a reminder that Bukhara is a very old place and that various different aesthetic styles have prevailed during its long history.
The other notable pre-Mongol structure in Bukhara is the tenth century Ismail Samani Mausoleum (not sure why this one survived the Mongol sack), which shares with the Kalon minaret a decorative pattern made from the arrangements of the bricks themselves rather than from tiling laid on top of them. I love the tilework I’ve seen in Khiva, Bukhara, and Samarkand, but I do also wonder how charming Bukhara must have been before the Mongol invasion if the whole city was constructed from this elaborate brickwork.
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| The Ismail Samani Mausoleum |
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| Brickwork on the interior of the mausoleum |
I got to reflect further on pre-Mongol Bukhara by writing the monthly newsletter for my online philosophy business on local hero Ibn Sina, aka Avicenna. Avicenna, who did most of his work in the early eleventh century, is generally considered the greatest of the Islamic philosophers, and arguably the greatest of all Medieval philosophers. His mother was Bukharan and he got his education there before leading a peripatetic adult life. It was enjoyable to write about him in a café on a street he most likely walked down.
Around the Ark
Bukhara’s oldest and most imposing structure is the Ark, the massive citadel that’s not just pre-Mongol but pre-Muslim. Bukhara’s rulers governed from the Ark as far back as the fifth century and continued to do so until the Ark, and the Bukharan Khanate, was bombed into submission by Russian forces in 1920. The citadel is now half ruined—although from the ruined ramparts you get an excellent view over Bukhara—and half palace rooms converted into museums, where you can admire traditional Bukharan crafts, ranging from horse riding gear to weapons to clothes.
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| Entrance to the Ark |
Bukharan crafts seem to be alive and well. A number of old, domed bazaars are still operative, and many of the former madrassas are now lined with merchant stalls. Beautiful clothes and textiles are on sale everywhere. There’s a bit of tourist tat but mostly I’ve been impressed at the high quality of the goods on sale.
Not far from the Ark, the Bolo-Hauz mosque has an exquisite aivan, or portico, with slender carved wood pillars supporting an elaborately decorated ceiling. It only dawned on me when I arrived that it was a Friday and the mosque itself would be closed for prayers (rookie mistake that this Istanbul resident shouldn’t have made) but it adds some atmosphere to the architecture to see the mosque in active use, and I gather the aivan is more impressive than the interior anyway.
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| Worshippers gathering at the Bolo Hauz mosque |
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| Ceiling of the aivan of the mosque |
Less delightful, and also not far from the Ark, is the notorious Zindan, or prison. The structure itself is just a forbidding hunk of brickwork but it’s the history of the place that makes it fascinating. Most notable for my recent reading, this is where Charles Stoddart and Arthur Connoly were imprisoned by the emir of Bukhara before they were beheaded in front of a large crowd outside the Ark. Stoddart had arrived in Bukhara in 1839—at a time when most Bukharans had never seen a European—on a diplomatic mission to reassure the emir over Britain’s interventions in nearby Afghanistan. A series of diplomatic blunders irritated the emir, who had Stoddart thrown in prison. Connoly arrived two years later to negotiate for Stoddart’s release, only to be thrown in prison himself. When the emir learned of Britain’s ignominious retreat from Kabul after the disaster of the First Afghan War, he concluded the British were paper tigers and had the two men executed.
There’s not a lot to see in the Zindan but you do get a view into the “bug pit” where Stoddart and Connoly shared company with lice and scorpions. To added effect, a morose mannequin is visible through the grating. Visible too are coins and banknotes—it seems the bug pit has become a kind of macabre wishing well.
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| The Zindan seen from without |
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| The bug pit |
Jewish Bukhara
Among the aspects of Bukhara that pre-date the Mongol conquest is its Jewish community. They’re one of the most ancient diaspora communities, tracing their origins to the Babylonian exile. At the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse, about 7% of Bukhara’s population was Jewish, although that number has fallen to just a few hundred since. They have their own language, Bokhari, which is related to Persian but written with the Hebrew alphabet, I suppose not unlike Yiddish in relation to German.
One of the guest houses in the old town where I was staying used to be the Jewish community centre and, for a fee, they allow people to visit the Jewish museum that occupies a large basement room (I’d feel a bit better about this fee if anyone running the guest house and museum was Jewish). The museum includes clothes, furnishings, and other effects of the Bukharan Jewish community but what I found most arresting were the black-and-white photos of Bukharan Jews that dated back a century or more. The prints were on sale, and I was tempted, but as much as anything I doubted they’d survive a month in my backpack.
After the museum, I went out to the Jewish cemetery just south of the old town. Both the cemetery and the synagogue (more on which in a moment) had armed guards, which goes some way toward explaining why Bukhara’s Jewish population has dwindled to near-extinction. The horrors unfolding in Gaza right now don’t help. I’ve had several people in Uzbekistan ask me what I think of Israel and Gaza and it’s clear their sympathies are not with Israel. Even peaceable G’iyosiddin in Khiva was surprised to be told that Judaism isn’t an inherently violent religion.
The guards at the cemetery didn’t want to let me in. I’ve been finding my Uzbekistan eSIM is very patchy in its reliability and I wasn’t able to call up Google translate to figure out what was and wasn’t allowed. This may have worked to my advantage, as repeated attempts to signal that I just want to look around eventually led them to relent and decide it would be easier just to let me in than to explain why I couldn’t.
The cemetery is immense and gives some sense of the size of Bukhara’s Jewish community. Near the entrance is a series of plaques bearing the names of the Bukharan Jews who died in the Second World War. Some of the graves in the cemetery are very recent, with death dates in the last few years.
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| At the entrance to the Jewish cemetery |
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| One of the many graves at the cemetery |
I was less successful with the guards at the synagogue. You’d hardly know a synagogue was there if it weren’t for the guards outside the unremarkable metal door. I first visited on Thursday, late in the day after seeing the museum and the cemetery, and the guards told me it was closed and I should come back the next day. The next day I was told it was closed again and so I asked when it would be open. They told me to come at nine the next morning. I did, and again I was told it was closed. My Google translate wasn’t working so all this communication happened through bad Russian on both sides. But on the third visit, it was clear that these guards didn’t have a key to let me in anyway so there was no point in insisting. As it happens, I did manage to visit a synagogue in Samarkand, but that will have to wait till the next blog post.
Last morning in Bukhara
I had an afternoon train to Samarkand booked for Saturday, August 2. I woke early that morning to see some of the sites one last time in the cool and the gentle light of morning. I spent a few minutes tracing the bands of patterned brick up the Kalon minaret with my eyes and wondering whether I’d ever set eyes on it again. It’s a funny thing with travel—and I guess with life in general—that there are so many wonderful things that we leave with a “maybe again someday” but without any firm conviction that that that someday will come. But maybe it will. We’ll see.
Walking through backstreets in search of the Hoja Zayniddin mosque, which I’d read was worth visiting, I walked past a gathering crowd of people in traditional dress. It all felt very National Geographic-y, with wizened old men in the traditional kalpak hat and men and women in elegant, loose-fitting cotton and silk. On the way back through the same streets, I saw a coffin laid out on the street and could hear chanting from within an adjacent courtyard. I tried to pass by quickly and discreetly.
The last outing, as in Khiva, was to an early twentieth century palace. The Sitorai Mohi Hosa was the last emir’s summer palace and was a twenty minute drive from the town centre. Like the Nurullabay Palace in Khiva, you get a sense of decadence setting in. Or maybe just Russian influence? It also made me wonder whether restraint in aesthetics is sometimes simply a matter of constraint. The unified aesthetic of earlier constructions might have had to do with limitations on what tools and resources are available. Once you open yourself up to Russian and global markets, the sky’s the limit, and you can deck out your palace with five foot tall Chinese vases, glittery mirrors and jewels on ceilings and walls as well as every shade of paint. It felt like a Central Asian spin on Art Nouveau but with the gaudiness of a petty tyrant. Naturally there was an ostentation of peacocks as well. And yes, I looked it up: the collective noun for peacocks is, quite delightfully, an ostentation. Or a pride or a muster. But I like ostentation.
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