I
In the early 15th century, the grandson of Amir Temur, Ulugh
Beg, received a gift from his father, Shah Rukh. The gift was the city of
Samarkand, Temur’s prided imperial capital. After Temur’s death, his vast
empire had fractured amidst a bloody battle of succession, and Shah Rukh had
just managed to stabilize his hold on the region. Ulugh, who was more
interested in arts and sciences than warfare, would eventually have a brief,
tragic two-year stint as a king. But during his several decades of life in Samarkand,
he will oversee the magnificent cultural peak of the Timurid Renaissance.
Ulugh wrote poetry and history, but his first love was
astronomy. In pursuit of that goal, he looked at the work of earlier
astronomers, especially Ptolemy from ancient Greece, and noticed that their
data was riddled with errors. So he set upon the task of inventing the
trigonometry and mathematics needed to make things right, recruiting elite
astronomers from across the Islamic world to build a team of scientists, constructed
a giant sextant at his Ulugh Beg Observatory (he had a deep trench blasted directly
into a limestone hill to hold a pure marble arc with an immense 40-meter radius),
published the monumental Zij-i Sultani with his team, which, alongside
mathematical breakthroughs like inventing a method to calculate the exact sine
value of small angles, produced a brand-new catalog mapping the precise
coordinates and brightness of more than 1000 stars. Zij-i Sultani will go
on to become the definitive handbook for astronomers in the Ottoman Empire and
Mughal India for centuries.
II
The Afrosiyob runs at almost 250 km/h, and connects major Silk
Road cities like Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bukhara. While its coaches are made
by the Spanish manufacturer Talgo, the Uzbeks picked its name after the ancient
archaeological site of Afrosiyob in northern Samarkand. Taking this high-speed
train cuts the journey between Tashkent and Samarkand to just about two hours,
half of what the regular passenger trains of Uzbekistan Railways would take, or
one-third of what it will take to get there on roads. Its tickets sell out
entirely within minutes of being released. I am lucky to get one.
The journey is short and pleasant, if one is careful enough
at the train stations. After my tête-à-tête with Uzbekistan’s genteel bureaucracy
at Tashkent airport earlier, I promptly keep paper tickets, anticipate x-ray
scanners and multiple checkpoints, and be generally more ‘present’ in wherever I
am. Dealing with bureaucracy is a good exercise in mindfulness, a point that
Kafka didn’t explicitly highlight in The Trial but hinted as much. The stations
at both ends are beautiful – aesthetically pleasing Soviet structures that seem
to be influenced more by Islamic tilework and colors than by brutalism. The train
drops me off at Samarkand station just before 10 am, and stepping out of the
air-conditioned coach feels equivalent to stepping inside a furnace. I take a
few minutes to adjust myself, click a few pictures, and find a place to sit in
the shade in a small garden within the station complex, with the goal of
drinking some water, soaking in the air, stretching my arms and legs, taking
out my sunglasses, and ordering a Yandex cab. Spending about twenty minutes in
that shade teaches me another quirk of the local bureaucracy: train stations such
as Samarkand remain locked, except for a short window before and after arrivals
of trains. I find them locked when I make my way to the exit after. I proceed to
locate a uniformed guard, use my best sign language to explain what I was doing
in the shade, show my paper ticket to confirm that I got off the Afrosiyob twenty
minutes ago, and walk out of the gates under his still suspicious eyes, my head
hanging in shame. The bureaucratic discipline has its benefits though; there are
no people loitering around either inside the trains or the stations, and no
vendors other than registered ones.
The train ride offers a fascinating mix of rapidly modernizing industrial zones, rustic Soviet-era towns, and extensive flat agricultural fields. The scenery from the window as the train pulls out of Tashkent changes from cityscape to bucolic pastures, first slowly, then abruptly. On the outskirts of Tashkent, and again when approaching the city limits of Samarkand, I see a massive boom of new, multi-story apartment complexes under construction that are transforming the edges of Uzbekistan’s historic cities. Once the train clears the industrial zones and enters the rural plains and rolling hills, there are flocks of sheep and goats grazing on the dry, golden pastures bordering the tracks. Amidst the wide-open cotton, wheat, and melon fields, I spot plenty of vineyards easily recognizable from my work in American wineries years ago. Uzbekistan apparently has a centuries-old winemaking and table-grape culture, and there are extensive, low-lying vineyards in the Syrdarya and Jizzakh regions that the train journey cuts through. I also see long rows of arched, plastic-sheeted greenhouses that local farmers apparently use to grow tomatoes, cucumbers, and lemons year-round, amidst the harsh climate that only allows a short growing season for delicate vegetables. The train route clings to the green patches on the country’s map, and the track runs through a geographical valley, sandwiched tightly between the western edge of the Tian Shan mountain system: the Turkestan Range and the Zarafshan Range on the left and the Nuratau Mountains on the right. About three-quarters of the way through the trip, right after the city of Jizzakh, the train slows down to squeeze through a narrow, rocky gorge called the Amir Temur Darvozasi (Gates of Temur). The rock walls of the mountains close in on both sides of the tracks, which apparently was a bottleneck that armies and Silk Road merchants had to use for thousands of years to get into Samarkand. When the train eventually gets past and the mountains recede, the landscape once again spreads into the dry, irrigated plains. Somewhere ahead is Samarkand, a city that many men were willing to kill for, across centuries.
III
Samarkand is situated in what’s called the Zarafshan (“Sprayer
of Gold” in Persian) valley. It is a ‘desert oasis’ – much like Damascus
(Syria) or Mendoza (Argentina) – making it indispensable for travelers. To the north
and west lie the lethal sands of the Kyzyl-Kum Desert, and to the south and
east stand the colossal, jagged peaks of the Tian Shan and Pamir ranges. The Zarafshan
river, originating high in the Pamirs, flows at its highest during the
blistering months of June and July due to melting glaciers, which provided Samarkand
with reliable water in the summer, making the valley a natural, flat, perfectly
watered highway. To go east to China or west to Europe, caravans had to
travel through this valley. Add the Amir Temur Darvozasi as the natural bottleneck
where even a small garrison of soldiers could successfully repel a massive
invading army, controlling Samarkand was a strategic prize.
By the time Temur arrived and made Samarkand his capital in
1370, the city was already a 2000-year-old ancient metropolis that had risen,
fallen, and rebuilt multiple times. Cyrus the Great absorbed Samarkand (then
called Maracanda) into the first Persian Empire as early as the 6th century BC.
Alexander conquered it in the late 4th century BC, famously declaring,
“Everything I have heard about Maracanda is true, except that it is even more
beautiful than I imagined.” Following centuries of dominance by native Sogdian
merchants, the city fell to the Arab conquests, flourished under the Samanids,
and was ultimately razed to the ground and largely depopulated, obviously, by
Genghis Khan in 1220.
After securing the city, Temur started to convert Samarkand into
a personal “Disneyland.” He moved masons, tilemakers, craftsmen, carpenters and
other artisans from every city he had captured and destroyed across Persia and
Central Asia. In addition to being a war megalomaniac, he also fancied himself
as an architect, and started designing extravagant structures with ridiculously
massive scale that defied architectural and engineering constraints. The Bibi-Khanym
Mosque that he built for his wife is said to be of the size of two and a half football
fields, while the arches of his Aq Saray palace at Shahrisabz spanned almost 73
feet and could be seen 25 miles away. Temur’s massive vanity projects, constructed
at extraordinary speed, began to collapse even during his lifetime due to structural
issues.
Temur’s aesthetic ambitions were equally extravagant. Based
on one historical record, a foreign envoy visiting one of his palaces describes
a gateway adorned with “very fine work in gold and blue tiles, the principal
reception room paneled with gold, and the ceiling entirely of goldwork.” His own
court apparently had trees made of gold as décor, with their leaves carrying
rubies, emeralds, turquoise, sapphires and pearls as fruit. The result was
excessive bling piled upon enormous scale, from a man who probably came into an
enormous amount of wealth without necessarily having the taste for it, and used
his own imagination rather than artists at his disposal.
Of Temur’s original, blindingly opulent city, the vast
majority of the gold, the jeweled trees, and the delicate marble work was
looted or destroyed during centuries of subsequent tribal warfare and
earthquakes. By the 19th century, the great dome of the Bibi-Khanym Mosque had
collapsed into rubble, and the staggering arches of the Aq Saray palace in
Shahrisabz were reduced to fractured, lonely brick towers. The Samarkand of
today is almost entirely a resurrection; a modern, postcard-ready city sculpted
by Soviet and Uzbek restorers who glued the shattered pieces of Temur’s hubris
back together.
IV
Walking out of the Samarkand railway station after the guard
obliged me by reopening the gates, I take a good look around. There is a bunch
of yellow Daewoo Nexias and Chevrolet Spark cars, with their bored drivers who
probably spent their energy goading passengers when the high-speed train
actually came in; I am just a delayed straggler who doesn’t seem very interesting.
On the horizon is a reasonably modern city, with apartment blocks, office
buildings with glass facades, and ongoing construction everywhere.
With the backpack straps digging into my shoulders through
the sweat-drenched t-shirt, I find my Yandex cab, a Chevrolet Cobalt, and wave
frantically. My driver is a young man in his 20s, dressed in a modern t-shirt
and jeans. As a creature of habit, I plop myself on the passenger seat in the
front, smile along with my rendition of as-salamu alaykum, and try to
pull the seat belt, only to realize that it probably hasn’t been used since its
inception and doesn’t seem to have a recoil mechanism. To ensure additional
safety, a small metallic device has been inserted into the area where the seat
belt is supposed to lock in, perhaps to prevent any accidental use of this egregious
human-tying apparatus.
“This is no problem; only driver; no problem.” My driver’s
voice is reassuring, and as the car speeds up, the hot air blowing through the
open window on the melting sunscreen of my face feels like a respite. A warning
beep originates from car dashboard. It slowly picks up its intensity and frequency
on being continuously ignored, until a heavy voice of a woman emanates from the
car speakers, possibly reprimanding me for not wearing my seatbelt. I look to
my side with a guilty face, and immediately feel reassured noticing my driver’s
nonchalant expressions. After a few minutes, the woman’s voice and the beeping succumb
into silence, giving up their valiant efforts. This city has been all about
winners and losers, and today, they have lost.
As the car makes its way from the newer, Soviet areas of Samarkand,
the flat roads turn into serpentine curves, move up, dip again, navigating along
the edges of the ancient Afrosiyob hills. There are dramatic glimpses of
turquoise domes rising over the crest of a hill, before being dropped back down
into a valley street. Along the way are a variety of local fueling stations proclaiming
Metan, Benzin, Propan, Gaz, Dizel, and I feel like reading the periodic table
of energy. This overwhelming variety sorts drivers into tiers – methane is the
cheapest, but the stations often have hour-long lines of cars waiting to fill
up. If one is in a rush, one can pay for propane, or really go extravagant and pay
for imported petrol (benzine). Also cutting through the roads are sleek,
green-and-white trams, apparently born out of a bizarre experiment when Tashkent
dismantled its tram network and shipped everything to Samarkand overnight. Somehow,
these trams took off in their new home, and are packed with daily commuters nowadays.
My driver slides out a cigarette from the pack of Esse in his
cupboard, and extends it towards me. I politely wave my hand to decline. He
lights his own stick, puffing and taking a good view of his city. We talk in signs
and occasional words. “Life is tough,” he says, or something similar, as if
apologizing for his smoking, and throwing both his hands up in the air in a gesture
of resignation. Then, taking a deep drag, he tilts his head, pouts his lips
into an exaggerated kiss toward the ceiling, and looking at the half-burnt
stick, says a single word “heaven.” A sharp honk jolts him back from his heaven
into our shared reality, and we lurch forward towards history.
V
In the crisscrossing narrow alleys of the old Samarkand neighborhood,
the concrete carriageway is split into two lanes by a drain flowing right in
the middle. A tired rusted signboard announces “Samarqand Shahar -> 200m”. Each
of two lanes of the carriageway are sufficiently wide for less than one
car-width, making these streets essentially one way; they were never meant to
host cars. A Lada 1600 is parked in one of these streets, straddled across the
drain, and appears to be yawning in boredom. At this hour of intense dry heat,
the streets are largely empty, and the only activity is inside dark, alcove
like houses, that look like a basement with their small windows, low-height
doors, and a lot of wood used in their construction. They seem aptly designed, small
and dark enough to stay cool, protecting themselves from the harsh climate.
Lada 1600 is
a relic of the Soviets, that had a remarkable 30-year production run from 1976
to 2006, becoming one of the most popular vehicles in Soviet history. It is
from an era when Soviet engineering produced things that were meant to last. Almost
the entire country today is dominated by Chevrolets; General Motors swooped into
Uzbekistan in 2008, taking over Daewoo's bankrupt assets, which used to be the
only manufacturer after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Uzbek government bought
out GM about 7 years ago, and its factory is now nationalized and runs as UzAuto
Motors. Around the same time, the government also reduced duties on electric
vehicles, and in any city one visits today, shiny Chinese cars from BYD, Chery,
and Hongqi zoom past the older vehicles from a different era.
I wake up
early the next morning, hoping to avoid the heat, and make my way to the crown
jewel of Uzbek tourism: Registan Square. The first impressions of the site are overwhelming:
three “madrasas” with their huge archway entrances, soaring towers, and
monumental domes, flank three sides of a large courtyard. Their turquoise, green,
blue, and gold colors glisten in the sunlight, and almost every patch of the
walls and the ceilings are covered with intricate mosaic tilework, geometric
ornamentation, and exceptional calligraphy. These are some of the greatest
examples of Timurid and later post-Timurid architecture that inspired what the Ottomans
and Mughals subsequently built elsewhere, primarily what I have seen in Turkey
and India.
The insides
of the structures are even more audacious. The oldest of the three, the Ulugh
Beg Madrasa, has a soaring, cavernous lecture hall where geometric tile stars are
an ode to its astronomer-king founder. The Sher-Dor Madrasa has a labyrinth of
student cells around an inner courtyard. Then there is the central Tilya-Kori
Madrasa, which literally translates to “decorated with gold.” It offers a
stunning deep blue and gold work across its walls and vaults, and is a feast
for the eyes. The vaults in particular use a ‘honeycomb’ structure that creates
an interplay of light and depth, further accentuating their power. Almost every
surface of the structures is covered in floral and geometric patterns, as well
as calligraphy imbued in everything. The square is an enormous architectural
theatre designed to be seen, demand attention, and almost intimidate.
After my initial
exuberance, a dose of realism starts to settle in. Almost all of the student cells
lining the inner courtyards the madrasas now host souvenir shops selling carpets,
hand-painted ceramics, and textiles. Each of the three madrasas was apparently built
in different time periods across a span of two and a half centuries between 1420
and 1660. And yet, they seem almost too perfect, much like a movie set. There
is a modern ‘audience’ filling into the square, and the towering structures beckon
them to ‘consume’ this dramatic experience. Salespeople cajole visitors to rent
traditional dresses and pose beneath the towering arches to get their Instagram-perfect
pictures. Electricity zips through these structures with modern plumbing, and more
cameras consume the monuments than human eyes. The entire complex is a deeply sanitized,
postcard-ready version of history that seems to have erased the scars of time.
Most of the original structures were reduced to rubbles over the centuries, and
what’s on display today is the result of an aggressive, massive restoration
campaign started by Soviet engineers and still in progress by the modern Uzbek
government. On one hand, the reconstructed walls and minarets, and the shiny re-tiled
surfaces provide a glimpse of what Samarkand once was. On the other hand, it’s
a modern recreation of a memory, and feels almost artificial – much of Temur’s Samarkand
was lost to his own engineering hubris, but perhaps the visual drama he
intended to inflict on the world survives intact. A short walk to Bibi-Khanym
makes me feel the ersatz even more sharply. Temur’s mosque built for his wife and
its entire complex was in ruins by the nineteenth century. Standing here today,
however, I see well-furnished buildings that are impossibly complete. It is
difficult to imagine what Temur actually built, what survived, and what the
restorers decided to present as history.
I find my way
across the busy Shah-i-Zinda street using a pedestrian overpass, and climb the
high slope of the hill on which the Hazrat Khizr Mosque is located. From one of
its balconies, there is a magnificent panorama of old Samarkand. The colossal
Bibi-Khanym complex is visible just across the street, its turquoise domes
floating over the colorful canvas of the Siab Bazaar. I had spent some time
wandering through that chaotic maze earlier: a large, pulsing market for dried
fruits, fresh lepeshka bread, and traditional sweets. Further down the horizon,
I can just make out the distant silhouettes of the Registan. From this vantage
point, it is somewhat easier to visualize the glorious Silk Road city of yore,
which once commanded the attention and fueled the desires of some of history’s
most valiant rulers.
Leaving the balcony of Hazrat Khizr, I walk to the Shah-i-Zinda necropolis. It is here that I find some of the old Samarkand coming to life; the curated theater of Registan and Bibi-Khanym melting away, replaced by something raw and more authentic. A steep flight of stone stairs leads me into a narrow, winding corridor of tombs that were built for Temur’s royal family and nobility. The entire complex is an intimate labyrinth of uneven surfaces and faded walls; almost antithetical to the immense, perfectly symmetrical plazas that I have seen so far. This site was also aggressively re-tiled around 2005, yet the narrow, subterranean layout resisted some of the sanitization. The mosaic tiles inside its humble shrines are visibly imperfect, often cracked, asymmetrical, faded, and extraordinarily beautiful. The interiors of these small enclaves are dark and cool, and there are patches of raw earth inside many of the tombs where time first stripped away the colors, and then the structure. There are few salespeople, fewer cameras, and a sort of quiet, sacred reverence to the place. This is an elegant avenue of the dead, where the swagger and propaganda of rulers of the past has yielded to the wheels of time. Rather ironically, for me, these sublime burial grounds are the beating heart of ancient Samarkand.
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