Bukhara and the Silk Road: Islamic Scholarship, Architecture and Urban Life

Merchants made Bukhara rich, but scholars made it famous. For a thousand years the city turned the profits of caravan trade into mosques, libraries, Sufi lodges and colleges, and the medieval historian Narshakhi recorded that one of its Arabic names was simply “the city of merchants”. The Bukhara Silk Road story is therefore less about a single great monument than about how a trading oasis organised itself around learning, worship and civic life, and how much of that order still stands in its brick lanes. On Day 22 of our small group Silk Road journey from Xi’an to Tashkent, the group travels by coach from Khiva across the Kyzyl Kum desert to spend the following day reading that order in the Ark, the Kalyan ensemble, Labi Hauz and the sunken Magoki Attari Mosque.

The Bukhara Silk Road oasis: water, trade and Sogdian roots

Bukhara grew on the lower course of the Zarafshan River, where the river splits into channels before fading into the desert. Irrigation turned that delta into a broad oasis of fields and gardens, with the Kyzyl Kum to the north and the routes to Merv and Persia to the south-west. Caravans travelling between China, India, Persia and the steppe needed exactly what such an oasis offered: water, food, warehouses, money-changers and a market large enough to absorb their goods. As our route guide to the Silk Road from Xi’an to Tashkent shows, the tour reaches Bukhara between Khiva and Samarkand, and it is the city where the relationship between commerce and learning is easiest to read.

Before Islam, Bukhara was a Sogdian city, part of the Iranian-speaking merchant world that carried much of the overland trade in late antiquity. The origin of its name is still debated: some scholars connect it with the Sanskrit vihara, a Buddhist monastery, and others with a Sogdian word of similar meaning. The Arab general Qutayba ibn Muslim took the city in 709 after several years of campaigning, and in 712 or 713 built a mosque inside the citadel. Conversion was slow, but over the next two centuries Bukhara became one of the intellectual centres of the eastern Islamic world. For the longer sweep of the country’s history, from Sogdiana to the Soviet period, our guide to exploring Uzbekistan’s history and sites sets the wider scene.

The Samanid court and the making of a city of learning

The turning point came under the Samanids, a Persian dynasty that ruled Transoxiana and Khorasan from 819 to 999, nominally on behalf of the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad. In 892 Ismail Samani united the family’s lands and moved his capital from Samarkand to Bukhara. Over the following century the Samanid court became a patron of scholarship and of the Persian language, which re-emerged here as a literary language written in Arabic script. Poets such as Rudaki worked at the court, and Arabic remained the language of religion and science.

Two of the most influential figures in Islamic intellectual history belong to this world. Muhammad al-Bukhari was born in Bukhara in 810 and travelled across the caliphate collecting the sayings of the Prophet; his compilation, the Sahih al-Bukhari, became among the most widely studied collections of hadith in Sunni Islam. Ibn Sina, known in Europe as Avicenna, was born around 980 at Afshana, a village near Bukhara, grew up in the city, and at about seventeen was made physician to the Samanid ruler Nuh II. He later wrote of a royal library in Bukhara holding books he had never seen before.

The Samanids’ best-known building is the dynastic tomb associated with Ismail Samani, which stands in a park on the edge of the old city. UNESCO’s World Heritage listing for the historic centre of Bukhara (inscribed 1993) describes the Samanid Mausoleum as “the best surviving example of 10th century architecture in the whole Muslim world”, and our article on the Samanid Mausoleum and its brickwork looks at it in detail. The Silk Road tour visits it on Day 23, straight after the Ark.

The Ark: a citadel at the centre of civic life

Every phase of Bukhara’s history passed through the Ark. The huge earthen citadel rises on an artificial mound built from the remains of earlier fortresses, and archaeologists believe it was already the residence of local rulers by around the fifth century AD. Its walls stand between about 16 and 20 metres high, enclosing almost four hectares, and visitors enter up a long ramp between two towers joined by a gallery. Inside was not a single palace but a small town: mosques, the throne room and reception court, the emir’s residence, a mint, storerooms, offices and prison cells. UNESCO notes that the Ark, rebuilt in the sixteenth century, has marked the town’s civic centre “from its earliest days to the present”.

The Ark’s later history is a reminder of how recent the old order is. The emirs of Bukhara ruled from here until 1920, when Red Army troops under Mikhail Frunze attacked the city. The last emir, Alim Khan, fled, by 2 September the citadel lay largely in ruins, and the Kalyan Minaret was damaged by shellfire. The restored sections now house museums on the city’s history, and the Silk Road tour begins its day of sightseeing in Bukhara here.

Karakhanid brick and the Kalyan Minaret

In 999 the Samanids fell to the Karakhanids, the Turkic dynasty whose city of Balasagun in the Chuy Valley is marked by the Burana Tower in Kyrgyzstan. The Karakhanids left Bukhara its great landmark. The Kalyan Minaret, the “great minaret”, was completed in 1127 under Arslan Khan Muhammad, according to most accounts, beside the city’s Friday mosque. Built entirely of fired brick, it tapers from a base about nine metres across to a lantern of sixteen arches, and its shaft is about 46 metres high. Its surface is wrapped in bands of brick laid in different patterns, so that the decoration changes as the light moves round it.

The minaret called the faithful to prayer, served as a watchtower and, tradition holds, so impressed Genghis Khan that he spared it when the Mongols took Bukhara in February 1220 and burned much of the city, including the mosque beside it. The Mongol sack is one of the reasons why, as UNESCO observes, relatively few buildings survive from before the Mongol invasion of 1220. Those that do, such as the minaret, the Samanid Mausoleum and the Magoki Attari Mosque, carry particular weight as evidence of the pre-Mongol city.

Po-i-Kalyan: mosque, madrasa and the Shaybanid capital

Bukhara recovered under the Timurids and then, in the sixteenth century, became the capital of the Uzbek Shaybanid dynasty. The Shaybanid governor Ubaidullah rebuilt the Friday mosque at the foot of the minaret, completing it in 1514, and when he became khan he chose to stay in Bukhara rather than move to Samarkand. Abdullah Khan II later made Bukhara the permanent capital of the khanate. Facing the mosque across a paved square, the Mir-i-Arab Madrasa was completed in 1535–36 and named after Ubaidullah’s spiritual mentor, the Yemeni sheikh known as Mir-i-Arab; Ubaidullah himself was buried beside him inside the madrasa. Mosque, minaret and madrasa together form the Po-i-Kalyan ensemble, “at the foot of the great one”, which the Silk Road tour visits on Day 23.

The arrangement is deliberate. Placing a Friday mosque and a madrasa face to face across a square created a single civic and religious space where the congregation, the scholars and the city’s rulers met. The mosque’s great courtyard, ringed by domed arcades, was built to hold the city’s Friday congregation. In 1946 Mir-i-Arab reopened under the Soviet-era Spiritual Board of the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan, and for years it was one of very few madrasas allowed to operate in the USSR.

A madrasa of this kind was a residential college. Students lived in small cells, or hujras, arranged around a courtyard, and teaching took place in the large vaulted halls and the open iwans that face it. The curriculum centred on the Qur’an, hadith and Islamic law, alongside Arabic grammar, logic and, in some periods, mathematics and astronomy. Across the Islamic world, colleges like these were usually supported by charitable endowments drawn from the income of shops, baths and farmland, which is one of the clearest ways commerce paid for learning.

Labi Hauz: the pool, the khanaqah and the merchants’ city

Water shaped Bukhara’s neighbourhoods as much as faith did. Until the Soviet period the city drew much of its water from many stone-lined pools, or hauz, fed by canals; they were also a notorious source of disease, and most were filled in during the 1920s and 1930s. Labi Hauz, “by the pool”, survived because it sits at the heart of an ensemble built in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The pool itself dates from about 1620. On its north side stands the Kukeldash Madrasa of 1568–69, the oldest building of the group, and on the west and east the khanaqah and madrasa built by Nadir Divan-Begi, a vizier of the Ashtarkhanid ruler Imam Quli Khan, in 1620 and 1622.

The khanaqah is the building that best explains Bukhara’s religious life. It was a lodge for Sufis, the mystical brotherhoods that were as important to the city as its law colleges. Bukhara is closely tied to Baha al-Din Naqshband (1318–1389), who was born near the city and gave his name to the Naqshbandi order, which spread from Central Asia across much of the Islamic world. A khanaqah offered prayer halls, lodging for travelling dervishes and a place for the collective remembrance of God, and it sat beside the madrasa in the same square, as it does at Labi Hauz.

The portal of the Nadir Divan-Begi Madrasa is worth looking at closely. Its tile mosaic shows two simurgh, the mythical birds of Persian legend, carrying white deer towards a sun with a human face, an unusual choice for a religious building and a sign that Bukhara’s builders drew on older Iranian imagery as freely as on Islamic geometry. Local tradition adds that the building was raised as a caravanserai and declared a madrasa by Imam Quli Khan at its inauguration, so that Nadir Divan-Begi had to add the portal and an extra storey of cells: a neat summary of how readily trade and learning shared the same buildings here. A little further on, the Ulugbek Madrasa of 1417, built by Timur’s astronomer grandson, faces the Abdulaziz Khan Madrasa of 1652 across a narrow street; together they show how the same paired plan was reused over more than two centuries.

Trade under the domes: Magoki Attari and the bazaar quarter

Between Labi Hauz and the Kalyan ensemble lay the commercial heart of the city. Here the main streets crossed under domed market halls, or taqs, each traditionally given over to particular trades such as jewellers, money-changers or hat-sellers. Those that survive are generally dated to the sixteenth century, and the Taq-i Zargaron, the “dome of the jewellers”, is one of those that survive. Caravanserais, warehouses and baths clustered around them, so that a merchant could lodge, store goods, change money and pray within a short walk.

The Magoki Attari Mosque stands in this quarter and has a very long history. The site is thought to have held a pre-Islamic temple and a market, and the name recalls both the hollow in which the mosque sits (maghak, a pit) and the attars, the sellers of perfumes and spices who traded here. Its carved brick south portal dates from a Karakhanid rebuilding in the twelfth century, and most of the present mosque from a reconstruction in the sixteenth. Centuries of rising ground left the building about three metres below today’s street level, and its buried portal was uncovered by the archaeologist V. A. Shishkin in 1939. The Silk Road tour ends its sightseeing in Bukhara here on Day 23, before an Uzbek dance show.

What the Silk Road connection reveals

Read together, these buildings show how a Silk Road city worked. Trade brought wealth and travellers; rulers and merchants turned that wealth into endowed colleges, lodges and mosques; and those institutions drew students and scholars from across the Islamic world, who in turn gave the city its reputation. UNESCO’s listing makes the same point about the townscape rather than any single monument: it calls Bukhara “the most complete example of a medieval city in Central Asia”, with an urban fabric that has remained largely intact and that reflects the urban planning of the Shaybanid period.

That is also what distinguishes Bukhara from its neighbours on the route. Khiva, the stop before Bukhara on the Silk Road tour, is a compact walled inner town, explored in our guide to Khiva’s walled oasis on the Amu Darya. Bukhara is larger, older in its layers and organised around neighbourhoods, markets and colleges rather than a single royal precinct.

How is Bukhara different from Samarkand for a visitor?

Bukhara is a city to walk through slowly, while Samarkand is a city of individual monumental set pieces. Samarkand’s best-known buildings, such as the Bibi Khanum Mosque and the Gur Emir mausoleum, were commissioned by Timur and his dynasty and express imperial power on a grand scale, as our article on Samarkand and Timurid ambition explains. Bukhara’s old centre is lower, denser and more continuous, with mosques, madrasas, pools and markets close together, so the pleasure lies in how they connect.

How many days do the tours spend in Bukhara?

The Silk Road tour arrives in the late afternoon of Day 22 after the coach journey from Khiva, spends all of Day 23 sightseeing in the city, and leaves by coach on Day 24 for Samarkand. On the way out it stops at Sitorai Mohi-Khosa, the summer palace of the last emirs of Bukhara, built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and at Gijduvan to see the pottery works of Alisher. The Stans tour reaches Bukhara from Turkmenistan on Day 11 and sightsees on Day 12 and the morning of Day 13, with the afternoon of Day 12 at leisure.

How much walking does a day of sightseeing in Bukhara involve?

Expect several hours on foot, much of it on old brick and stone paving. The Silk Road tour is graded Level 2, Moderate: participants need to be able to climb and descend stairs and take part in three to five hours of physical activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven ground. The Ark is entered up a long ramp and the Magoki Attari Mosque lies below street level, so steps and slopes are part of the day. The Stans tour carries a higher activity grade, which its tour page sets out.

Are entrance fees to Bukhara’s monuments included?

Yes, on both tours. The Silk Road tour page lists sightseeing with English-speaking guides, including all entrance fees, and the Stans tour page lists applicable entry fees and the services of local guides. For country-level matters such as visas, currency and the best months to travel, see our answers to common questions about travelling in Uzbekistan.

Bukhara on the road from Khiva to Samarkand

For travellers on the Silk Road tour, Bukhara comes near the end of a journey that began in Xi’an. On Day 22 the group crosses the Kyzyl Kum, the desert that for centuries marked the northern edge of Transoxiana and the beginning of the nomadic steppe, stopping to see the desert’s plants and wildlife before arriving in Bukhara late in the afternoon. What waits there is less a single monument than a city where trade, faith and learning shared the same streets for more than a thousand years, best read slowly in a small group of up to 16 travellers, with local guides to set each building in context.