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Until the
last century Samarkand, at the centre of the Silk Route, was more
remote to Westerners than the moon is today. In 400 years only two
Europeans reached Samarkand, according to legend. Now Intourist buses
and Uzbekistan aircraft are threatening to ferry in thousands of
tourists.
We got there
just in time.
More than
its blue domes and leaning minarets shimmering in the heat, it is the
legends - and the mystery of Samarkand's scantily recorded history -
which attract us still. But today "the golden road to Samarkand"
is a bore, thanks to Soviet industrialisation which until recently
flowed from Tashkent. To ensure that Samarkand remains a fascinating,
never-to-be-forgotten destination, you need to approach it from
another angle in another age.
Go first to
Bukhara, approaching it from the Kizyl-kum or the Kara-Kum deserts.
Your last stop before entering "the Noble City and intellectual
capital of the East" will probably be the Rabati-Malik
caravanserai, where a subterranean lake (still preserved in 1995)
nourishes your whole camel train. From here it is a hard day's ride
to Bukhara, but from dawn you will be watching the skyline for signs
of the Kalyan minaret, which until last century was one of the
highest edifices on Earth.
At night,
with fires burning in the lantern-top of the 800-year-old Kalyan
minaret, it acted as Bukhara's lighthouse for desert travellers. In
daylight, it became "the Tower of Death".
Genghis Khan
stood before it in awe in the 12th century while his horsemen
ransacked and razed the rest of the city. They slaughtered men, raped
women, and hurled the city's leaders from the tower. For the next six
centuries, prisoners, slaves, criminals and unfaithful wives have
been thrown from this minaret into the marketplace below. It is said
that the last body crashed among the spectators as late as 1920.
Bukhara's
reputation is schizophrenic. Unutterable cruelty down the ages, on
the one hand, inexpressible artistry on the other. Genghis Khan
spared the Tower of Death, but he also spared one other edifice - the
Samani Mausoleum, described as one of the most exquisitely beautiful
buildings in the world. The Great Khan and his horde failed to
notice it because it stood in a cemetery. They were too busy savaging
the living to take notice of the dead.
Built more
than a thousand years in 18 different two and three-dimensional
patterns of bricks, bound together with egg-yolk and camels' milk,
the Samani temple is one of the oldest monuments of the Muslim world.
"You
see it brown, now in the noon sun, but under the full moon it takes
on a rosey glow. It transforms into a glistening glass structure,
floating above the ground," we were told. Unfortunately the
moon was sickle-new that night.
I watched an
elderly woam in boots and veil hobble around the mausoleum, touching
certain bricks and kissing others on each corner.
"If you
walk round the monument three times and make a wish, it will come
true," we were told - and given examples of miracles happening
to recent tourists. Only two of our party failed to set off at speed
- sparing the kisses - to make the pilgrimage. "Walk round six
times, and include me in your wishes," called my companion as he
and I rested on shady steps among the local artists.
Art, and the
works of local poets, are almost as numerous as the carpets and
golden garments in Bukhara's bazaars. In the Old City's converted
madrassas, we ducked into dark-cool caverns to sip tea and dawdle
over rugs. The merchants are polite and eager, the prices of the
merchandise not yet badly affected by tourist trade.
Bukhara
never forgets that it boasted, after 900 AD. a library of 45 000
books, and that one of its sons, Avicenna - poet, philosopher,
musician - compiled a medical encyclopedia which stood as a core
text for the world for centuries. With its 360 mosques and 80
madrassas, the ancient city of Bhukhara exudes an atmosphere of
stability and peace.
Not so the
Ark, a city-within-a-city. The Ark is a fortress that has been
reduced to rubble so many times in the past 2 500 years that it has
raised itself on its own ruins to stand on an artificial hill
overlooking Bukhara. The Ark is a storybook-style castle with a steep
ramp leading up to forbidding towers and a huge wooden, iron-studded
door. Once past the guards the cobbled entry-way curves steeply
upwards through a passage lined with... cells where prisoners were
chained by their necks in the dark........ prison cells.
Until the
last Emir fled before the Russian troops between the World War I and
II, prisoners were chained by their necks in the dark. They were
released each Sabbath to beg for food which had to be eked out until
the following week..... The emir sat on a marble throne behind these
25-foot fortress walls, where his subjects, even this century,
crawled aon all fours into his audience chamber. They departed
backwards, facing their ruler at all times. He also had a music
pavilion, above the prison cells in the gatehouse, from which he and
the royal guests could watch people being pushed from the tower into
the marketplace below. The death business was more brisk here than at
the Kaylan minaret.
The
notorious Nasrullah, a 19th century emir, had a special prison built
outside the Ark. A red carpet would be laid through the streets for
him to visit it. Here was the "Snake Pit", a 6 metre
underground jar-shaped cell filled with scorpions, snakes, rats,
ticks and other vermin. The emir's most famous victims were two of
the four Britons who ventured into the city before 1850. Their
adventures - recklessly playing the "Great Game" of
empire-building - are the material for several books and too long to
summarise here. Each, supremely over-confident, travelled alone,
ignoring all dangers and all customs.
Lt-Col
Charles Stoddart, for instance, rode his horse up the ramp of the Ark
when he should of walked. He walked where he should have crawled. . .
and he ended in the Snake pit, with nothing to eat but rats, and an
occasional jar of water lowered to him in the dark to keep him alive.
His rescuer, Capt Arthur Conolly of the Bengal Light Infantry, also
ended in the Pit. Later both were executed.
Which makes
it a good moment to leave Bukhara and head for Samarkand, whose
legends are older and deeper. The blue domes of Tamurlane's Registan,
and of his favourite wife's giant mosque - tremble on the desert air
long before the city itself comes in
view.
If Bukhara
is schitzophrenic, Samarkand is the product of megalomania. After
Alexander the Great razed the city (and killed his friend for not
believing that the Greek leader was a god); after Genghis Khan had
"slit open wombs to kill babies" and savaged the city
again; Tamurlane plundered the world to rebuild it. He brought
materials and skills from Rome to Beijing. While holding court in
silken tents that covered acres, he started building his Registan -
"Place of Sand" - sand used to soak up the blood of
victims whose heads were displayed on spikes. His buildings were on a
scale and embellishment unheard of by mankind.
Geoffrey
Moorhouse wrote recently that ". . .For all 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."
It is
beautiful. It is big. And it is uniquely flawed. It's soaring
minarets were never meant for muezzins. They were built to
hold up the sky. They are not perpendicular but lean in different
directions. The weight of the sky is obviously too much for them -
but they still stand after 500 years, magnificently off-verticle. One concerns
Tamurlane's chief wife, Bibi. |
