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Journey to the Centre of the World – 12
Blue domes and minarets, in the “noblest public square in the world”, bend under the weight of the sky. In this Registan – this “Place of Sand”- once stood a giant pavilion of silk surrounded by 20,000 tents.
Great Khan’s Samarkand
WE WERE NOT FAR from the point where we would be able to see the famed blue domes of Samarkand rising above the hilltops ahead of us.
More than the blue domes and leaning minarets shimmering in the heat, it was the legend and mystery of Samarkand's scantily recorded history which had lured explorers to search for its gates, and poets to sing its praises from afar. In 400 years, according to legend, only two Europeans reached Samarkand. Little more than a century ago Samarkand was more remote to Westerners than the moon is today.
When we were there in 1995, however, Intourist buses and Uzbekistan aircraft were getting ready to ferry in thousands of Western tourists. All that was required at that point was to clean up the semi-abandoned Soviet hotels, and their plumbing, which left a stench in the nostrils. We already had an inkling of what was ahead. "The Golden Road to Samarkand" had become a modern-day bore, thanks to Soviet industrialisation which, until recently, flowed in from Tashkent.
To ensure Samarkand remains a fascinating, never-to-be-forgotten, other-world place, you need, once again, to approach it from a different angle, in a different age.
In this way you experience its historical climate and the magic of the golden road that leads finally to Samarkand. By first visiting other stations on the Silk Route, you are able to appreciate that, if Bukhara was schizophrenic and Khiva was paranoid, Samarkand is the product of megalomania.
Despite everything, however, Samarkand's azure blue domes and its minarets remain one of this planet's more memorable sights. You see them emerging above the sand hills as your bus bumps through the desert. You see them shimmering and disembodied, with a background of snowcapped mountains. But the romantic illusion ends when you come over the hill and clatter your way through the old city, into the new. The new city, built by the Tsars and maintained by Soviet Russians, is closer to the snowcapped mountains and the Oxus (Amu Darya) River. It's leafy avenues are broad and contain fountains, flowing canals and even an opera house. The new town might be interesting, were it not a parasitic pimple on an ageless, monumental, desert civilisation.
The Old City, has corners filled with ancient romance and beauty and horror - but only if you know where to look into the past. When you find the past in the mud-bricked flat-roofed ancient city and in the ruins of the Great Khan's shimmering blue temples that reach up from the desert towards Paradise, then the fabled capital of the Silk Route may at last grip your imagination.
You must use your imagination to get beyond the litter, drunken street-poles, clattering motor-trucks and flashily dress citizens who invade the ancient Samarkand. You have to focus very hard on the monuments to appreciate their grandeur. Old Samarkand is big, even by modern standards. And it is interestingly flawed. Its soaring minarets were built with grander aims than accommodating the muezzin at prayer. They were towers created to hold up the sky. However, the weight of the sky has obviously proved too much for them, for they have bent out of perpendicular and they now lean in different directions, almost defying gravity. Yet they still stand after 500 years, magnificently off-vertical.
Geoffrey Moorehouse wrote of Samarkand's most famous square: "For all of the sumptuous inlay of its semi-precious stones, the Taj Mahal in Agra was made to seem virginal beside the Registan of Samarkand."
And a hundred years earlier Lord Curzon described it as “the noblest public square in the world”.
But - and this is a cold, desolate 'but' - expectations of it are shattered because it stands so empty, so sadly useless, in all its potential grandeur. When I was there its huge edifices loomed like a giant’s theatre-set, waiting for players – the hordes of tourists to come, perhaps, but more likely waiting for its great ghosts of the past.
That is why, to feel and understand the Samarkand of your dreams, you must approach it through its dreams. You must live its legends, and know its wild history.
End of 12-part magazine series. Final epilogue follows. . . . "The Legends"
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