Uzbekistan: Samarkand — Where Uzbekistan Meets the Silk Road

Samarkand, Uzbekistan: Golden Tombs and Blue Tiles

We slept like the dead. The mattresses at the Ideal Hotel were outstanding, the sort you sink into and then can’t be bothered to climb out of. After weeks of beds of widely mixed quality, including one in Bukhara that felt as if it had been stuffed with walnuts, this was bliss. I had started to think a decent bed was something you only found in adverts and in the houses of other people. It turned out to be real, and it was in Uzbekistan.

Breakfast was just as good, and for two vegetarians it was a proper treat. Travelling through Central Asia without eating meat can be a challenge, because the local idea of a light snack is half a sheep on a stick. Cooking here is built around lamb, and vegetables tend to be what turns up beside the lamb, mostly to keep it company. So we weren’t expecting much. What we found was a long table of fresh salads, big bowls of thick creamy yoghurt, a great selection of fruit, and a whole section of little sweets and pastries that we really should have left alone and didn’t. Karen said it was the first breakfast of the trip where she hadn’t had to play “spot the meat”. She went back for seconds to prove her point, and then for thirds, which she said was research.

So we were fed, rested and cheerful, which is not a combination that happens to me often. I should have known it wouldn’t last. I had a cold coming on, and it had been working its way into my head for several days like a bad tenant.

Today we were exploring Samarkand.

🐪 A Few Words About the Place

Before I go on, I should say something about Samarkand itself. It’s one of those names, like Timbuktu or Xanadu, that people use to mean “somewhere impossibly far away and exotic”. Most of the people who say it couldn’t find it on a map. I certainly couldn’t until a few months ago, and I’d have put it somewhere near Afghanistan and hoped for the best. It’s in the south-east of Uzbekistan, in a fertile valley watered by the Zarafshan river, with the mountains of Tajikistan not far to the south. Uzbekistan’s capital, Tashkent, is a few hours to the north-east by road.

It’s a very old city indeed. In 2007 it officially celebrated its 2,750th birthday, which makes it about as old as Rome and a good deal older than London. The Romans didn’t get round to founding London for another eight hundred years or so, and when they did, they probably picked the wettest spot they could find. In ancient times Samarkand was called Marakanda, and it was the capital of a region called Sogdiana. The Sogdians were the great traders of the ancient world. Their language was the common tongue of the Silk Road for centuries, and their merchants set up little communities from here all the way to China. They were the middlemen, and middlemen have always done rather well.

Alexander the Great captured the city in 329 BC. He’s supposed to have said that everything he’d heard about Marakanda was true, except that it was even more beautiful than he’d imagined. He then spent the next couple of years fighting a nasty rebellion in the area. In a drunken row at a banquet in the city, he killed one of his oldest friends, a man named Cleitus, who had actually saved his life in battle some years before. So perhaps he didn’t enjoy the place as much as the quote suggests. I’ve been to a few dinner parties like that myself, though without the spear.

Being on the Silk Road is what made Samarkand. The Silk Road wasn’t really one road at all, more a loose web of caravan routes running between China and the Mediterranean, and Samarkand sat right in the middle of it. Silk, spices, porcelain, horses, glass, gold, slaves and above all ideas passed through here. Buddhism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism all had followers in the city at one time or another, which makes it more tolerant than some places I could name in the home counties. The Arabs arrived in 712 under a general called Qutayba ibn Muslim, and Samarkand gradually became Muslim.

Not long after that, in 751, the Arabs beat a Chinese army at the Battle of Talas, in what is now Kyrgyzstan. The story goes that among the prisoners were Chinese papermakers. They taught the locals their trade, and Samarkand paper became famous right across the Islamic world. It was cheaper and easier to make than parchment, and it helped books and learning spread like never before. Eventually papermaking found its way to Europe, so in a roundabout way every parking ticket I’ve ever been given owes something to Samarkand. I’m not sure whether to thank them or not.

For centuries the city did very well under various Persian and Turkic dynasties, until 1220, when Genghis Khan arrived and, as was his habit, flattened it. A city of perhaps four hundred thousand people was left a ruin. The old site of the city, on a hill to the north called Afrasiab, never really recovered, and the people simply moved south and built something new next to it.

Then, a century and a half later, along came Amir Temur, whom we’d met in Shakhrisabz the day before. You may know him as Tamerlane. That name comes from “Timur the Lame”, and it wasn’t meant as a compliment. In 1370 he made Samarkand his capital, and he set about turning it into the finest city in the world. He did this mostly by conquering everywhere else and bringing back their best architects, craftsmen, painters and weavers, whether or not they wanted to come. It’s a very efficient way to build a city, if you don’t mind the paperwork. He even named nearby villages after great cities like Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo, so that visitors would be left in no doubt about where the centre of the world was.

After the Timurids, the city went into a long decline. The Shaybanids moved the capital to Bukhara in the sixteenth century. The sea routes opened up by European sailors took trade away from the Silk Road, and by the eighteenth century Samarkand was nearly empty. The Russians took it in 1868, and the railway arrived in 1888. From 1925 to 1930 it was even the capital of Soviet Uzbekistan, before Tashkent took over. In 2001 UNESCO made it a World Heritage Site under the title “Samarkand – Crossroad of Cultures”, which sums it up nicely and is a good deal more modest than “the centre of the world”.

That’s the history lesson over. I did try to keep it short. I failed, but I tried.

🕌 The Tomb of a Man Who Wasn’t Meant to Be There

After breakfast we met our driver Ishmael, who was by now as much a part of the trip as our luggage and a good deal more reliable than some of it. He drove us to our first stop, the Gur-e-Amir, the Mausoleum of Amir Temur. There we were reunited with our guide Cholas, who had come over from Shakhrisabz with us the day before and was ready to carry on where she’d left off, singing Temur’s praises.

The name Gur-e-Amir means “Tomb of the King”, and funnily enough it wasn’t built for Temur at all. He had it built in 1403 for his favourite grandson and chosen heir, Muhammad Sultan, who had died that year at about twenty-seven, of wounds and illness after campaigning in Anatolia. Temur was heartbroken, as far as a man like that could be. You’ll remember that he already had his own tomb ready and waiting back in Shakhrisabz. But when he died in early 1405, on the road to invade China, the snow in the mountain passes stopped his body being taken home, and he was buried here instead. Over the following years more of the family joined him. There’s his son Shah Rukh, another son Miran Shah, his grandson Ulugbek, whom we’d be hearing a great deal about later, and his old spiritual teacher, Mir Sayyid Baraka. Temur actually asked to be buried at his teacher’s feet, which was a surprisingly humble wish from a man who otherwise had very little humility to spare.

From the outside it’s beautiful. There’s a tall, ribbed turquoise dome that looks a bit like a giant melon, sitting on a high drum covered in blue and white tiles and bands of writing. The ribbing is no accident, as it makes the dome look taller and catch the light better. Inside it’s even more striking. The walls and the high ceiling are covered with gold. Much of it is gilded papier-mâché, which sounds like something from a primary school, but it really isn’t, I promise you. It was restored in Soviet and modern times using a great deal of real gold leaf, and the whole room seems to glow. It’s hard to take it all in, and you find yourself standing in the middle of the floor like a man who has forgotten why he came into the kitchen.

In the middle, inside a low marble railing, are the tombstones. Temur’s stands out a mile. It’s a great slab of very dark green jade, so dark it’s nearly black, and it’s thought to be one of the largest pieces of jade in the world. Ulugbek brought it from Mongolia in 1425, twenty years after his grandfather’s death, which must have taken some organising. There’s a crack running through it, and that comes with a story. In 1740 the Persian conqueror Nader Shah came through, took a fancy to it, and carried it off to Persia, and in the process it broke in two. After that Nader Shah had nothing but bad luck. His son fell ill, things went badly for him in general, and his advisers eventually persuaded him to send it back. Which he did, and things apparently got better. I said to Karen it was the medieval version of the sign on the office fridge that says “Do Not Touch”, only with more consequences than a stern email from Janet in accounts.

Here’s something else that surprised us. The tombstones you see aren’t actually over the real graves. Those are in a crypt below, which is usually locked, and that brings us to the best story of all.

In June 1941 a team of Soviet scientists, led by the anthropologist Mikhail Gerasimov, opened Temur’s tomb to study his remains. Gerasimov confirmed that the skeleton had damaged bones in the right leg and arm, so the stories of Temur the Lame were true. He also went on to rebuild the face from the skull, which is a trick he was famous for. There was supposedly an inscription warning that whoever opened the tomb would unleash an invader even more terrible than Temur himself. The Soviets, being Soviets, ignored this. They opened the coffin on about the 20th of June. On the 22nd of June 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Temur was put back with full Islamic rites in late 1942, and not long after came the Soviet victory at Stalingrad.

Now, I’m a sensible man from London and I don’t believe in curses. I’ve walked under ladders and I’ve broken mirrors, and my life has been no more disappointing than it would have been anyway. But if I’d been in charge of that dig, I’d have left him well alone, just in case. Karen said that was the most sensible thing I’d said all week, which I chose to take as a compliment.

The Gur-e-Amir also had a big influence on the wider world. Temur’s descendant Babur went on to found the Mughal Empire in India, and the Mughals took the idea of grand domed family tombs set in gardens with them. Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi and the Taj Mahal itself owe a lot to this building. We hadn’t expected to find the Taj Mahal’s great-grandfather on a quiet street in Samarkand, but there it was. It had no queues and no one selling fridge magnets, and I couldn’t help feeling it deserved a bit more fuss.