Bukhara was once 'the Noble', 'the most interesting city
in the world', according to Curzon, generous as ever with superlatives.
The holiest city in Central Asia, It had 360 mosques and 80 madrasas, from
which the sun shone upwards while on ordinary cities it shone down.
Now
it is a medium-sized city (population 250,000) in the middle of the Kizyl-Kum
desert, with Central Asia's only inhabited Intact historic core. To paint
It rosier might lead to disappointment. Where Samarkand is bright blue
Bukhara is an exhausted shade of khaki; where Bukhara was holy, Islam Is
now having to be re-learned; where its famous domed bazaars once teemed
with people from every corner of Asia and smelt of their wares, nowadays
there are only carpets and reproduction silverware for tourists.
Still, historic monuments are strewn denser and wider
here than In Samarkand and they illustrate 1000 years of history, not just
two centuries of intensive building by outrageous exhibitionists. And among
them, down mud-walled streets, walk people who live and work here. They
outnumber the tourists, unlike the Inhabitants of old Khiva. They take
tea by the sacred pool at Lyab-i-Khauz and wash in the 16th - century public
baths exactly as they have for centuries.
They
have also dug a huge hole in the middle of the old town which will take
the foundations of an international three-star hotel for Muslim visitors
to the Mir-i-Arab madrasa, Central Asia's biggest Islamic seminary. The
fabric of the city has always waxed and waned with Islam; the Bolsheviks
deliberately let it shrink and decay in the 1920s as a way of stamping
out religion.
Whatever happens to Bukhara next, its major monuments
will still be there for us to gawp at. The mausoleum of the Samanids is
not about to crumble after a thousand years. And the great Kalyan minaret,
which stopped Genghis Khan in his tracks 700 years before Bolshevism was
invented, may reasonably be scanning the next millennial horizon with a
certain worldly ennui.
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