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The Story
On the front of the madrasa on the east side of the square, two large cats are chasing two white deer, and out of the back of each cat rises a sun with a human face. They are made of glazed tile, they are enormous, and they are the first thing anyone entering the square looks at.
Figurative animals on this scale are unusual on an Islamic religious building, which is part of why the images have been argued over for four centuries. A royal emblem, a survival of much older Persian sun-and-lion imagery, a private joke by a governor with the power to indulge one: the readings vary. The building's own inscription is less coy about it and openly praises the skill of the craftsman who pulled it off. The madrasa is named for them. Sher-Dor means lion-bearing.
The Sandy Place
The name of the square itself promises nothing. Registan means sandy place, and that is what it was: a flat dusty clearing where six roads met. This was where Samarkand's crowds gathered, where the market ran, where decrees were read out and sentences carried out. The three spectacular facades came later and are, in the end, walls built along the edges of a public space that already existed.
The Astronomer's Madrasa
The oldest of the three went up in the 1410s, built by Ulugh Beg, grandson of the conqueror Timur. He was an indifferent ruler and a serious astronomer, and his madrasa taught mathematics and astronomy at a level that drew the best scholars in the region.
The teaching had a laboratory attached. On a hill outside the city Ulugh Beg built a vast meridian instrument, a curved arc sunk partly into the ground, and the star catalogue produced with it stood as some of the most precise observational work done anywhere before the telescope. His figure for the length of the year is off from the modern value by seconds.
None of that protected him. In 1449, setting out on pilgrimage, he was killed on the orders of his own son. The observatory was pulled apart, its stone carted off, and its location forgotten so thoroughly that it had to be rediscovered in 1908 by a Russian archaeologist working from property deeds that described where it had stood.
A Ceiling That Lies
Two centuries after Ulugh Beg, a powerful regional commander cleared the older buildings on the other two sides of the square and replaced them, first with the Sher-Dor and then with a third madrasa finished around the 1660s. Its name means gilded, and the mosque inside it is covered in gold leaf.
The best thing in it is a trick. Standing under the mosque's main space and looking up, you see a deep dome overhead. There is no dome. The ceiling is flat, and the depth is painted.
What It Survived
The square declined along with the city. Trade routes shifted, Samarkand shrank, earthquakes worked on the brickwork. Photographs taken by Russian visitors in the late nineteenth century show a Registan with collapsed domes, tile falling off in sheets, and portals half buried in accumulated ground level.
One of those photographs shows the minaret at the corner of Ulugh Beg's madrasa leaning badly. By 1932 it was close to coming down onto the entrance below it, and the standing proposal was to dismantle and rebuild it. The engineer sent to deal with it, Vladimir Shukhov, had spent his career building new things, steel towers and lattice masts. Here he did the opposite: without taking the minaret apart, he wrapped it in cables and winched the whole shaft back upright by degrees. It worked, and it is still standing where he left it.
The rest of the twentieth century brought steady restoration of all three buildings, domes rebuilt, tile surfaces completed. Some of that work has been sharply criticised, because the line between conserving and reconstructing kept getting crossed. How much of the facades you photograph today is original is not a question with a short answer.
Now
The Registan has been inscribed since 2001 as part of Samarkand, Crossroads of Cultures. The square is floodlit at night, and the student cells behind those famous portals are mostly shops.
The pressures now are urban development around the protected zone and salt damage from groundwater in the brick foundations. Ulugh Beg's minaret has stood at Shukhov's angle for over ninety years, which is a useful reminder about this square: nothing here has stayed up by itself. Somebody keeps having to hold it.