Like Louis XVI hunting boar in the grounds of Versailles while Paris seethed, Bukhara's last emir played out his final months in power in a ridiculous summer palace north of the city, spying on his bored harem through secret peepholes and trying to incorporate Russian teapots in Islamic decorative art while the Red Army tightened its stranglehold on  his heritage and people. Sitorai-Mokhi-Khosa, built mostly in the 19th century but still being added to in 1918, is the great and only repository of 'Bukhara Kitsch'. Reached from two blocks east of the Hotel Bokhoro by buses 9 and 13, or, much easier, by taxi, most of it is open to the public, though part of the grounds now belong to what was sinisterly known in Soviet parlance as a neurological sanatorium.

The main gate is a puny but very garish mockery of every great pishtak in Bukhara and Samarkand. It leads to a modest courtyard sacrificed to the hard sell of mass-produced silk dressing gowns, which in turn leads to Said Alim Khan's palace-within-a-palace round three sides of a larger yard. Named after him and finished in 1917, this is now a branch of Bukhara's History Museum. A guide will probably  
have attached him or herself to you by now if you did not arrive with one. 

Honored guests were received in the White Hall, which forms the west side of the yard and was decorated by a master stucco plasterer called Usto Shirin Muradov whose picture hangs by the entrance and whose hands were maimed on the khan's orders when his work was done-either for some trifling error or so he could not reproduce the design for anyone else. The ornate plasterwork in the hall, like most interior decor in the palace, originally had a generous garnish of gold leaf which  
was taken by the Bolsheviks and replaced with bronze. 

The fireplace in the chess room round the corner to the left is German; the silver boxes and fish are genuine antique Bukharan. Red and blue banqueting halls follow, the first with red lighting, blue stained glass and a fine collection of daggers; the second, equally nauseating, has a mirror which reflects you 40 Times. The ordeal by psychedelic ends when you reach the emir's chai-khana, more  
window than wall, containing his ancestor priceless collection of Chinese vases. 

A paved walkway leads from the male playground to the female. So, reputedly, did a secret tunnel for the exclusive use of the voyeuristic emir. Beside a large khauz now overlooked by the neurological sanatorium is a two-storey building, more European than Asian in style, where the emir's begums used to live. The harem was said to number 400 by 1920, when M. N. Roy, an Indian member of the Central Asiatic Bureau of the Corn-intern, decreed a mass divorce and allowed Red Army troops in to take their pick. According to his own account, quoted by Moorhouse, 

'The storming of the harem took place under strict vigilance, and nothing unpleasant happened. The begums, of course, behaved like scared rabbits, but the sight of the husky young men scrambling for them must have made some impression on them. Able-bodied young men seeking their favor was a New experience to women whose erotic life could naturally not be satisfied by a senile old man. At the end it was a pleasing sight-the secluded females happily allowing themselves to be carried away by proud men.' 

In the official guesthouse, discreetly separate from both palace and harem, there is a collection of royal robes which is outshone by the one in the Tashkent Museum of Art although the spare room itself must have rivaled any in the world for sheer extravagance. There were 4.5 kilos of gold on its walls. 
[back]