Ravanak

The train from Bukhara to Samarkand takes about 4 hours. The track is lined with a series of numbered posts which fall every kilometre, and around half-way the number is 3,900. But the numbers are going down so they can't mean km. from Moscow. Could they mean the distance to Beijing? Or Vladivostok? Curious.

For more years than I care to remember I've had a longing to take to golden road, or rail, to Samarkand and it's wonderful to fulfil this. The city was known to Alexander the Great but its glory days came in the 14th century on becoming the capital of the Timurid empire. In its heyday, besides modern Uzbekistan, it covered most of the other Stans, Iran, Iraq and a fair chunk of Turkey. The legacy is a wealth of medieval mosques and madrassas covered with patterned blue tiles, many of which spell out Koranic quotations, and topped with shiny turquoise domes. One of the finest of these is the Bibi Khanum mosque, named after the favourite wife of the empire's founder, Timur or Tamerlane. The car in the foreground is an old Moskvich, while the little kiosk in the second image is manned by the Tourist Police. Their slogan is "your trusted and faithful friend in Uzbekistan"---a nice touch. It's also here that two young women ask me to join them in a group photo (a practice I have come across, in India) so I do a chin in, chest out, shoulders back pose like Del Boy in "Only Fools and Horses". It's only fair then to ask them to pose for my camera.

If as the saying goes, Isfahan is half the world, Samarkand is the other half. Registan Square is a stupendous ensemble of Timurid architecture and the rising ground is the perfect spot for endless selfies and wedding processions. Entering the complex allows one to enjoy the buildings at leisure; now no longer used for religious purposes, they offer a healthy chatter for buying and haggling at the numerous craft stalls. I remember that this style of diagonally patterned brickwork is seen in some Victorian buildings and I wonder if William Butterfield, designer of my alma mater Rugby School, was a convert. Another curiosity is the lion/tiger that decorates one of the madrassas and also the 200 som note (worth about 2p!) I hang around for golden hour and a cheer goes up when shortly afterwards the floodlights come on.Read more