Last Updated on March 2, 2024

Uzbekistan is now easier than ever to visit and, with visa-free travel for over 90 countries, it is actively enticing travellers in search of that special destination.

The break-up of the USSR was an incredibly exciting time for anyone wanting to go behind what had been the Iron Curtain, new countries with unfamiliar names, all newly formed from former Soviet republics, were slowly opening up to travellers. So, when the chance came in 1994 to go to Uzbekistan, it just had to be taken.

Here’s something I wrote about Bukhara at the time. From what I can see though, it hasn’t changed all that much – it still offers a fascinating insight into past worlds, ancient and more recent.   

The Kalyan minaret had seen it all. Built for the muezzin’s call in the twelfth century, it had seen Ghengis Khan come, kill, destroy and then go; cruel Emirs throw criminals and faithless wives from the top; British soldiers play the Great Game and die. Now it saw us, standing between the mosque and madrasa in the heart of old Bukhara.

The town was quiet. Its people had retreated behind their mud­ brick walls to watch TV and left the city to a few cats and a couple of tourists who had slipped out of their hotel to look at Bukhara by night. This was difficult with no moon and only a few weak street lights, but the darkness fed the imagination instead. We walked through empty alleys with, it seemed, the ghosts of centuries of inhabitants, past ancient doorways, to the centre of town.

There, we gazed up at the high arches, domes and portals of the Kalyan mosque and the Mir-i-Arab madrasa, a religious college.

Once it had been “Holy Bukhara” with hundreds of mosques, madrasas and minarets. A centre of Islamic teaching, a millennium ago it was the religious and intellectual heart of an empire which covered all of present-day Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and much of Persia and Afghanistan. Pilgrims and scholars came from every part of the Islamic world to pray and to study.

After absorption into the Soviet Union, most of the mosques and madrasas were closed. The Mir-i-Arab, though, was allowed to stay open. Today it is attracting more and more students as the Central Asian countries re-discover their Islamic roots. Unlike many Western students, these had clearly gone to bed early, as the college was still and in darkness.

The voice of a small boy broke the silence. “You like some tea?” he asked. As the town had little else to offer in the way of nightlife, we followed him to a typical mud-brick house, where we went through one of those ancient, battered doorways into a small yard. Here we were invited to sit on a wooden platform, a sort of double bed with a little table on it. We drank green tea from china bowls while being stared and giggled at by the children of the area. We were evidently a novelty in a place where independent travellers were fairly scarce and tour groups usually stuck together.

In conversation, our few words of Uzbek turned out to be useless as our hosts were Tajiks, one of Uzbekistan’s many ethnic groups. So, in a mixture of simple English and Russian, a few smiles and a lot of misunderstanding, we chatted about nothing in particular, a buzz of light and animation in the darkness and stillness of the night.

Stoddart and Conolly, two previous visitors to Bukhara were not received so hospitably. Stoddart came in 1839 to persuade Emir Nasrullah, the archetypal cruel oriental despot, to side with Britain in the Great Game of diplomacy, politics and espionage against Russia which was then extending its empire south towards India. Stoddart was imprisoned. Conolly came to free him but was also imprisoned.

In a classic of fiendishness, they were held in a pit of vermin: rats, cockroaches, lice and scorpions before being beheaded in front of the Ark, the Emir’s palace. The pit still exists as a reminder of less friendly days, but now contains nothing more verminous than a scattering of Uzbeki banknotes and a couple of figures dressed quite presentably as supposed prisoners of Nasrullah.

There have been a lot of changes since the days of the old tyrant, but the town bears the marks of seventy-odd years of so-called civilising Soviet rule fairly lightly and enough character remains to conjure up some vivid images of past times.

The shrine of Chashma Ayoub or the Spring of Job, where the Old Testament prophet caused water to well up, still offers cool, fresh water but the Soviets thought it would also make a good place for a museum of sanitation and water supply. This crassness does not stop the women of the city from coming, as they have always done, to drink and take away the water.

Their simply styled dresses, sometimes teamed with trousers in the same material, shimmer in flame-like patterns of yellow, red, gold, white and purple, and are strikingly modern. The men wear western trousers and shirts topped off with a black and white skull cap or, if older, go for loose, knee-length striped coats with soft high boots. Grey goatee beards complete the look and the effect when Bukhara’s old men get together to drink tea and talk around the Lyab-i-Khauz, the Holy Pool, is pure Central Asia.

In the same way, the streets belong to the past more than the present, too. Everything is built from sun-dried mud-brick and is almost uniformly beige but with some spectacular splashes of colour. The domes of the mosques and madrasas are tiled in the freshest of turquoise while their portals and arches are covered with intricate patterns in cobalt blue, white and green glaze. Quotations from the Koran in stylised Arabic script ring the towers.

While many came to Bukhara to marvel at the beautiful buildings or for spiritual reasons, many came along the Silk Road for secular purposes, to buy or sell in the domed markets built over the town’s several crossroads. These were cunningly designed to cool the traders by drawing in cool air at ground level as the dome was heated by the sun.

In those days you could buy anything from silver to slaves, now though you have to hunt out the most banal objects. An afternoon’s search for a suitcase to replace the one bashed beyond use by the local baggage handlers was eventually successful, but only after we saw one at the back of a shop that sold everything from tights to televisions.

Our visit must have been the highlight of the week in view of the interest taken by all the other customers who gave loud advice and insisted we were shown the best case in the shop. This was not difficult with only two to choose from and after a little haggling, we settled on a price which met with the approval of the other customers.

Bukhara certainly met with our approval. It was easy to enjoy the friendliness of its people, its beautiful and exotic architecture and its feeling of antiquity. It was not quite so easy, though, to conjure up the hustle and bustle of pre-Soviet Central Asia. Bukhara has been tidied up and its people ordered in the soviet style.

By day you struggle to sense the vitality that there must have been. But at night, if you let the shadows and the quietness work on you, old Bukhara comes up and grabs your sleeve once again.

More information on Uzbekistan is available here.