The Registan in Samarkand appears suddenly, as if the city has been hiding it. You turn a corner from a street of Soviet-era apartment blocks, and there it is: three madrasas covered in blue tile, their portals rising thirty meters into the sky, their surfaces geometric with stars and arabesques. I had seen photographs, but nothing prepared me for the scale or the color. The tilework is not paint. It is glazed ceramic, fired in kilns, cut by hand, and fitted into plaster with a precision that modern construction cannot replicate. I stood in the square for an hour, watching the light move across the facades.
Samarkand: The Jewel of the Silk Road
Samarkand was the center of the Timurid Empire in the fourteenth century, and its monuments reflect that wealth. The Gur-e Amir Mausoleum, where Timur is buried, is a dome of fluted blue tile that seems to float above its drum. The Shah-i-Zinda necropolis is a street of tombs, each more ornate than the last, built over six centuries by the city's elite. I visited at seven in the morning, before the tour groups arrived, and had the complex almost to myself. A caretaker named Akbar opened a side chamber and showed me a section of original fourteenth-century tile that had been preserved behind a wooden screen. The colors were deeper than the restored sections. 'This is the real thing,' he said. 'Not the postcard.'
Bukhara: The Living City
Bukhara is smaller than Samarkand and feels more lived-in. The old city is a maze of alleys, caravanserais, and domed bazaars where traders have sold carpets, spices, and ceramics for a thousand years. The Kalyan Minaret, forty-seven meters tall, dominates the skyline. Genghis Khan supposedly ordered it spared when he destroyed the city in 1220 because he was impressed by its height. I climbed to the top for a view of the city and the Kyzylkum Desert beyond. The stairs are narrow, the air is hot, and the view is worth every step. At night, I ate at a chaikhana near the Lyab-i Hauz pond, drinking green tea and watching locals play backgammon under the mulberry trees.
Khiva: The Museum City
Khiva is the smallest of the three cities and the most intact. The Itchan Kala, the walled inner city, is a UNESCO World Heritage site where almost every building has been preserved or restored. Some travelers find it too perfect, too museum-like. I found it haunting. Walking the walls at sunset, with the call to prayer echoing from the Juma Mosque and the desert wind carrying sand into the streets, I understood why traders had stopped here. Khiva was the last oasis before the desert crossing to Iran. It offered water, shelter, and safety. Today, it offers something rarer: a city that looks almost exactly as it did four hundred years ago.
Practicalities and Costs
Uzbekistan has a liberalized visa regime, and citizens of most Western countries can enter visa-free for thirty days. I flew into Tashkent and took the high-speed train to Samarkand, a two-hour journey that cost twelve dollars. The train to Bukhara took four hours and cost fifteen dollars. From Bukhara to Khiva, I took a shared taxi, a six-hour drive across the desert that cost twenty dollars. Accommodation ranged from twenty-five dollars for a guesthouse in Bukhara to sixty dollars for a boutique hotel in a converted madrasa in Khiva. Food was excellent and cheap. A meal of plov, the Uzbek rice and lamb dish, cost three to five dollars. The total cost for ten days was nine hundred eighty dollars.
