“Everything I have heard about the beauty of Samarqand is true – except that it is even more beautiful than I could have imagined”Alexander the Great, 329 BC
Samarkand is perhaps the most famous city of modern Uzbekistan. The site of Samarkand was settled about 2500 BC. In times of old the city was known as Afrosiab, and also as Maracanda by the Greeks. The city was the capital of Sogdiana, and was conquered by Alexander the Great in 329 BC. It subsequently grew as a trade center on the route between China and the Mediterranean region.
Even those who have no notion of the existence of Uzbekistan do somehow recall the mythical name "Samarkand". How many travelers have not come through here, since thousands and thousands of years and some have left raving accounts of the city"s splendor. There are plenty of travel stories, tales and legends and first hand accounts, no matter where you are from, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland, America, Great Britain, Japan, Italy, one of your own countrymen/women may have written about Samarkand already.
Samarkand is such a multifaceted city, it is not the museum town of Khiva, no longer has the narrow winding lanes that distinguish Bukhara"s old town, Samarkand is a city with small town flair, where people really live a busy life. The fact that Samarkand was once a Russian garrison makes for all the lovely Empire style one storey houses which right now go through a real revival, in the downtown area they are being renovated everywhere and their charm is being preserved, Art Deco elements included.
Historical monuments of Samarkand
“Suddenly we caught a glimpse of painted minarets trembling in the blue astringent light and the great Madonna blue domes of mosques 
Laurens van der Post, Journey into Russia, 1964
It is worth coming all this way for the Registan, the most spectacular architectural ensemble in Central Asia and the centre of Samarkand since the Mongol invasion. When you see the three great madrasas for the first time, rising petrol blue through the petrol fumes, it"s hard not to feel you have arrived somewhere significant. Registan (pronounced with a hard "g") means "place of sand"—it was strewn on the ground to soak up the blood from the public executions that were held here until early this century. This is where Tamerlane stuck his victims" heads on spikes, and where people gathered to hear royal proclamations, heralded by blasts on enormous copper pipes called dzharchis. But first and foremost this was a market; a riot of stalls and stallholders" shacks until Tamerlane had them flattened for his grand bazaar in 1404.
Ulug Bek Madrasa
Caravanserais for itinerant traders formed part of the square even after the construction of the Ulug Bek madrasa (1417-20) on its west side. Commissioned by and named after Tamerlane"s astronomer son, who probably lectured here, this ancient seminary is appropriately decorated with a mosaic of stars over its enormous pishtak or portico. Every other square inch of its exterior is covered in mosaic too, using virtually every motif permitted in Islamic art. Floral ones sculpted into faience tiles around the niches and doorways, spirals up the pillars on the edges of the portico, bands of Kufic calligraphy round the inside of the iwans (the high vaulted arches in the middle of each wing), and geometric patterns known as girikhs—some of them amazingly reminiscent of computer graphics - on the minarets and the facade. (The minarets were never used by muezzins; they were ""said instead to hold up the sky” the northern one is famous for its inward lean, attributed variously to architectural genius, the weight of the sky, earthquake damage and optical illusion. Soviet engineers tried and failed to straighten it. The main door leads to a courtyard bounded by a mosque at the far end and two storeys of lecture halls and students" cells on the sides.
Sher Dor Madrasa
Two centuries were to pass befor
Tilla Kari Madrasa
A caravanserai was pulled down on the north side of the square to make way for its biggest, newest and most extravagant building, the Tilla Kari madrasa (built 1646-59), Its 120 m-long facade is unusual in incorporating the outward-facing arche
The mosque was built along with the madrasa but was always a separate institution, built to succeed Bibi Khanym—which had already collapsed—as the city"s main place of worship. Women were allowed in on Fridays.
For now, the substance of what Curzon called "the noblest public square in the world" remains intact, and it may still be true that "no European spectacle indeed can adequately be compared with it, in our inability to point to an open space in any western city, that is commanded on three of its four sides by Gothic cathedrals of the finest order.
Bibi Khanym Mosque
According to legend this was the idea of Tamerlane"s Chinese chief wife Bibi Khanym, who meant to surprise him with a colossal monument on his return from his 1398-99 Indian campaign. Instead he was surprised by a love-bite on her neck, left there by the mosque"s philandering Persian architect. Tamerlane sent a platoon to seize the adulterer dead or alive, but he fled up one of the soaring minarets he had just built, leapt off the top and flew home to Persia.
The reality was scarcely less prosaic. The mosque was Tamerlane"s own idea and was to be grander than anything he had seen on his travels. It was built between 1399 and 1404 by 500 laborers and 95 elephants brought back from India, and 200 architects, artists, master craftsmen and masons from the rest of the empire. At its neared completion, Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo witnessed, the infirm emperor throwing coins and meat to the workmen from his litter to goad them on, "as one should cast bones to dogs in a pit". An observer wrote of the finished mosque: "Its dome would have been unique had it not been for the heavens, and unique would have been its portal had it not been for the Milky Way." The portal was nearly 30 m high and the dome even higher. "Decorated with majolica mosaics, carved marble and painted and gilded papier mache, they stood at the west end of a marble-paved, colonnaded courtyard larger than a football pitch (130 m by I 102 m), with a minaret at each corner. The main gates opposite the mosque were made of seven different metals and were flanked by ceramic columns 50 m high. Two minor mosques looked inward from the north and south towards a giant marble Koran-holder in which rested the Osman Koran, said to be the second Koran in history, whose script was so big the imams could read it from balconies along the colonnade. The Koran-holder is still there and crawling under it is said to make barren women fertile. The Koran itself was brought to Samarkand from Damascus by Tamerlane, and sent to the Hermitage in St Petersburg by General Kaufmann in 1875 and to the Uzbek Academy of Sciences in Tashkent in 1919. The Muslim authorities in Tashkent finally recovered it in 1989.
The Bibi Khanym complex had been completed in an almighty rush and started crumbling even before Tamerlane"s death the following year. A 17th-century earthquake destroyed more than half of it and another in 1897 left cracks in the main dome, already hit by a Russian shell in 1868. Lay-people had stopped praying here for fear of falling masonry. Now the clergy left too, and the courtyard became a cotton market. The walls had long served as a brick quarry for other building projects and the great gates had been melted down by an avaricious emir of Bukhara.
Original plans for the site were discovered in Leningrad in 1974, and five years later reconstruction began. Much brickwork has been strengthened and the courtyard walls and minor domes have been re-built, but the money has run out and the main mosque"s scaffolding and crane are now permanent features of the Samarkand skyline. There is a chance of funds from UNESCO, but not if the mosque is closed to non-Muslims as some local Muslims want.
Shah-i-Zinda Ensemble
A cousin of the prophet Mohammed named Qasim ibn-Abbas, believed to have visited Samarkand in 676 AD while converting Sogdiana to Islam, was at prayer in a shady spot on the edge of old Afrasiab when a band of zealous fire-worshippers stole up and beheaded him. Not one to be distracted by trifles, Qasim first finished his prayer. Then he picked up his head, tucked it under his arm and jumped down a nearby well where he has lived ever since, ready at a moment"s notice to return to the defence of Islam. In another version he escaped the infidels by walking into a cliff which opened miraculously for him. Qasim (or Kussam) is the "Living King" from whom the Shah-i-Zinda royal necropolis takes its name. The position of his well is unknown but his mausoleum, a place of pilgrimage, is one of a street of tombs with what is reckoned to be the finest glazed decoration in Central Asia.
A memorial complex already existed here in the 12th century, but the Mongols destroyed everything except Qasim"s shrine, of which Ibn Battuta wrote in 1333: "The inhabitants of Samarkand come out to visit it every Sunday and Thursday night. The Tartars also come to visit it, pay vows to it and bring cows, sheep, dirhams and dinars. All this is used for the benefit of visitors and the servants of the hospital and the blessed tomb." The initial main body - Kusam-ibn-Abbas Complex is situated in the northeastern part of the ensemble. It consists of several buildings. The most ancient Kusam-ibn-Abbas Mausoleum and Mosque of 16th century are among them.
The Ulug Bek Observatory
The grandson of Tamerlane, Ulug Bek was less interested in conquering the earth than the stars. His was the best-equipped observatory in the medieval world; a magnet for leading scientists and a centre of progressive, often heretical thought. "Where knowledge starts religion ends," was the motto of his teacher, Kazi Zade Rumi, and Ulug Bek"s quest for enlightenment led him to sponsor debates on such topics as the existence of God. This did not go down too well with Muslim orthodoxy, and among those who found his beliefs hard to stomach was his own son, who assassinated him on 29 October 1449. Shortly afterwards, religious fanatics tore down the observatory.
Ulug Bek"s astronomical observations, which put him on a par with Copernicus or Kepler, did not become know
What nobody knew was where, or quite how, Ulug Bek had worked. Then in 1908, after years spent studying ancient manuscripts, a Russian primary school teacher, amateur archaeologist and former army officer called Vladimir Viatkin unearthed the lower portion of a giant sextant on Kukhak Hill beside the road to Tashkent. It was one of the major finds of the 20th century.
The original sextant was a perfect arc of marble-clad brick, 63 metres long with a radius of 40 m, calibrated in degrees and minutes, decorated with the signs of the zodiac and aligned with one of the earth"s meridians. Observations and measurements were made with an astrolabe mounted on metal rails either side of the sextant. What survives, complete with calibrations and fragments of rail, is the lower section of the arc, set in a deep rock trench to minimize disturbances from earth tremors. The arc originally continued upwards above the trench inside a round, three-storeyed observatory at least 30 m high. Traces of its foundations are all that remain. The top two floors were arcades used as solar and lunar calendars. Ulug Bek probably used the ground floor as a summer residence. There is a small museum on Uzbek astronomy and the opening of Tamerlane"s tomb. The astronomy section includes an old engraving of great astronomers in which Ulug Bek sits alongside Copernicus and Galileo dressed as a Cossack, whose garb was the most eastern-looking the engraver could envisage. The modest grave near the entrance to the sextant is Viatkin"s; he was buried here in accordance with his will.
Gur Emir Mausoleum
Tamerlane died in February 1405 on his way to China with an invasion force of 200,000 men. His body was perfumed with rose-water, musk and camphor, placed in a coffin decorated with pearls and dispatched—in the dead of night to avoid unsettling his troops—back to Samarkand 400 miles away. He was buried in the mausoleum he had built for his grandson Mohammed Sultan, who had died fighting in Turkey in 1403. It became known as Gur Emir—the Ruler"s Tomb.
The first version of Gur Emir, completed in 1404, was not grand enough for Tamerlane. He had its famous ribbed canteloupe dome, and the drum on which it stood, rebuilt on the scale of the Bibi Khanym mosque in two weeks flat. The outer dome is now 32 m high and the inner 18 m, with a complex system of supporting struts between them. (Round the drum beneath the outer dome runs a kufic inscription 10 m high: "There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet." Under this, in an octagonal hall, lie six cenotaphs of white marble and one of jade. The marble ones commemorate, among others, Mohammed Sultan the grandson; Shah Rukh, Timur"s youngest son and heir, who ruled the rapidly shrinking Timurid empire from Herat in modern Afghanistan; Ulug Bek, who ruled Samarkand as Shah Rukh"s 
The seventh cenotaph is Tamerlane"s. As he lay dying he had whispered, "Only a stone, and my name upon it," but he got what was then the biggest slab of jade in the world. Some say it was sent from the mountains of Chinese Turkestan by a Mongolian princess; others that Ulug Bek brought it from there himself in 1411. The Persian invader Nadir Shah tried to carry it away in 1740 but it broke in two so he left it alone. Cemented back together, it normally appears black in the low light that filters through the four fretted arches round the hall. Only direct sunlight through the east door in the early morning brings out its true green.
No expense was spared on the hall itself. Its walls are covered with hexagonal green alabaster tiles up to a band of once-gilded marble at head height. Higher up, bands of calligraphy frame clusters of stalactites and blue and gold geometric panels. Laid end on end, the gilding on the underside of the dome would stretch for 3 km. Below the cenotaphs, 3m down in a crypt closed to the public, lie the real graves and tombstones.
Tamerlane"s Ghost
Tamerlane took a while to settle in his tomb, according to Hans Schiltberger, a German who had served at his court: "After he was buried the priests that served the temple heard Timur howl every night for a year. Finally, they went to his son and begged that he set free the prisoners taken by his father in other countries, especially those craftsmen he had brought to his capital to work. He let them go, and as soon as they were free Timur did not howl any more.
Now that he lay at peace he was not to be disturbed. Legend had it that, engraved on the underside of his tombstone, was the epitaph, "If I am roused from my grave the earth will tremble". He was not roused for five and a half centuries. Then a distinguished Russian anthropologist, Mikhail Gerasimov, obtained permission to exhume the body. In order not to offend local sensibilities Gerasimov entered the crypt in secret, on the night of 22 June 1941. He opened the coffin around 3 am - and within minutes an assistant burst in with the news that Kiev and Minsk were being bombed and that Hitler"s armies had invaded Russia. Gerasimov"s examination, which confirmed that Tamerlane had indeed been lame from a wound to his right leg, took nearly two years. Within the days of the skeleton being reentered, the Germans surrendered after losing nearly a million men at Stalingrad.
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