Historic Centre Of Bukhara

In the 1930s a Soviet archaeologist working on the western edge of Bukhara started digging into what looked like a low hill in an old cemetery. What came out of it was a building: a perfect brick cube with a dome on top, each of its four sides identical, the walls laid in a basket-weave pattern that changes as the sun moves across it. It had been built in the tenth century for the family that ruled Bukhara at its height, and it is one of the oldest surviving Islamic buildings anywhere in Central Asia.

It survived because nobody could find it. Centuries of windblown earth and burials had swallowed it almost completely. When the Mongol army arrived and set about erasing the city, the most beautiful thing in it was already underground.

The Year Everything Else Burned

Bukhara held out against Genghis Khan for a matter of days in 1220. The city surrendered, the garrison in the citadel was destroyed, and then the fires started, which in a city built of mudbrick and timber is the same sentence as the end of the city. The chronicler Juvayni describes Genghis riding into the congregational mosque and telling the assembled population that he had been sent as the punishment of God.

When the smoke cleared, almost nothing stood in the centre. One exception: the brick minaret beside the mosque. Why it was spared is not known. The story people tell is that Genghis tipped his head back to see the top and his hat fell off, and picking it up he decided that anything which had made him bow should be left alone. That account appears in later retellings rather than in the contemporary sources. The minaret, however, genuinely did survive, and it is still there.

Light Going The Other Way

It had gone up in 1127, replacing an earlier minaret that had collapsed, which is presumably why the foundations were dug so deep and the mortar left to cure before the shaft was raised. The whole thing is brick, stacked into bands of ornament that climb the tower without a single band repeating. From the lantern at the top the call to prayer went out five times a day, and at night a fire was lit there so that caravans crossing the desert could find the city.

Bukhara at that point was the densest concentration of scholarship in the region, with dozens of madrasas and libraries. Ibn Sina, who grew up nearby, wrote about working his way through the ruler's library as a teenager. There was a saying about the place: everywhere else, light falls down from the sky, but from Bukhara light rises up.

The Tower Had Another Job

The minaret's later career is uglier. For at least two centuries it doubled as the city's place of execution: the condemned were put in a sack and thrown from the gallery at the top, in full view of the square. Nineteenth-century European travellers write it up as the Tower of Death. It was, in the same decades, the tower the call to prayer was sung from. Very little in Bukhara has only one function.

Domes Over The Crossroads

In the sixteenth century the city roofed over the points where its main streets crossed. The result is a set of covered bazaar intersections still standing and still in use, each with its own trade: jewellers at one, cap-makers at another, money-changers at a third. Putting a dome on a junction is a simple idea, and in this climate it solves shade, air movement and meeting place all at once.

Water was the recurring problem. Bukhara had dozens of open reservoirs that supplied drinking water and, along with it, a parasite that shows up in the city's medical record for centuries. Soviet administrators drained most of them in the 1920s. The largest survivor still functions as the city's living room, with mulberry trees around the edge.

What It Survived

The city recovered from the Mongols, grew again as a khanate capital in the sixteenth century, and ended up as an emirate under Russian protection. In 1842 the emir had two British officers executed in the square below the citadel on charges of spying, an episode that stayed in the newspapers in London for years.

In 1920 the Red Army shelled Bukhara. The citadel was largely destroyed, the last emir fled to Afghanistan, and the religious institutions were closed down. Madrasas became warehouses, mosques became museums.

Now

The historic centre has been on the World Heritage list since 1993, and the inscription covers the street fabric, not a handful of monuments. That is the right way round: the value here is in the mudbrick houses and narrow lanes between the famous buildings.

The serious threat is rising groundwater. It wicks up through brick foundations and the salt it carries crystallises as it dries, crumbling the brick from the inside. For nine hundred years the minaret stayed up by outlasting earthquakes and armies. What is working on it now is water, moving very slowly, from below.