Samarkand to Bukhara

Following the Silk Route

Our five days in Samarkand were filled with wonder and delight at the architecture, history and culture. We had a comfortable apartment a little way out of town but taxis were cheap and plentiful if a bit unpredictable when it came to the final fare. One of our favourite rides took us back to the perimeter of The Registan where the friendly driver pulled up with a theatrical flourish, gestured towards the magnificent square and pronounced ‘Welcome to Samarkand!’, with evident pride and pleasure.

We couldn’t figure out the buses so did plenty of walking around the city. We enjoyed wandering in and around Navoi Park, which was home to a couple of splendid statues. This one is of a seated Timur- huge and resplendent in all his power on an enormous throne at the edge of the park.

Timur plotting diabolical acts in the after life…

Between 1357 and 1405 Timur the Lame (due to his wounded leg and known as Tamburlaine to western ears, thanks to Christopher Marlowe’s 16th century play) conquered and brutally transformed most of the Islamic world between the Mediterranean and the Hindu Kush. It was an astonishing achievement but came at a terrible cost. He has a reputation for cruelty and devastation that exceeds even the likes of Genghis Khan. Although he destroyed the old order, he also sowed the seeds for a major cultural renaissance with the craftspeople he kidnapped and brought back to Samarkand, transforming it into one of the world’s great cities. His descendants became connoisseurs of poetry, painting and calligraphy, especially his grandson Ulugh Beg, who commissioned ground-breaking works of astronomy and mathematics from the 10,000 scholars he employed as well as writing many seminal works of his own. 

A more peaceful figure from Islamic history is Alisher Navoi (1441 - 1501), who is commemorated by the park’s name. He was a poet, calligrapher, painter and sculptor, based in Herat but whose influence was felt right across the Timurid Empire. I particularly like this statue of him in the park, endlessly hobnobbing with fellow poet Abdur Rahman Jami (1414 - 1492).

Eventually we reluctantly dragged ourselves away because we couldn’t ignore the irresistible pull of the Silk Route and took the train to Bukhara. There are fast and slow trains from Samarkand to Bukhara. You can whizz there in an hour but we were in no hurry and relished the chance to gaze out of the window of a provincial train for three hours. It was comfortable and clean and we had a picnic lunch to sustain us. The view, it has to be said, was mostly of the Kyzylkum (Red Sand) Desert, which is about 300,000 square km and covers much of western Uzbekistan. After a couple of hours, we met Navoi again when the train pulled into the large industrial city named after him, this time spelt Navoiy on the station sign and bidding us Xush Kelibsiz - Welcome. 

While we waited to move off, I vaguely speculated how it would be to simply get off the train, take a job teaching English and set up home there. Then I remembered I’m retired and anyway we’re following the silk route to Bukhara and we have a hotel booked but maybe, you never know, one day…then the train moved off and the moment passed. So instead of moving to his eponymous city, I spent the rest of the journey reading his poems in translation. He was a great one for the ghazal - a lyrical love poem similar in structure to the sonnet, frequently on the theme of lost love. The penultimate couplet often includes the poet’s name, referring to themselves in the third person. These forlorn lines caught my eye:

'Do not say Navoi is ungarmented, he wears
A robe of nonexistence, a misfortune-sewn fragment'

An hour later we arrived in Kagan, the station for Bukhara, which is some distance out of the old city. Colin Thubron, who was there in 1993 (30 years ahead of us), explains why: 

‘A century ago, when the railway first neared the city, the people had never set eyes on such a thing. It was beneath the dignity of the emir - a vassal of the Russians since 1868 - to travel on a train, and its pernicious track had to skirt the holy city by ten miles. People dubbed it the Devil’s Wagon…Now I trudged out of a silent station and into the lamp-lit night. A perverse excitement was stirring me. Bukhara! For centuries it had glimmered remote in the Western consciousness: the most secretive and fanatical of the great caravan-cities, shored up in its desert fastness against time and change.’ (from The Lost Heart of Asia, 1994). 

Thubron was to become a talismanic guide during our time in the ancient city. We arrived mid-afternoon and were met by a young lad from the hotel. He was part of the family who owned the place and explained that he and his older brother had spent the previous summer fruit picking in England so he was keen to practise his English with me. He talked enthusiastically about their time in Herefordshire and, travelling along the Silk Road into the ‘desert fastness’ of Bukhara in the afternoon heat, I struggled to remember Herefordshire’s name, its whereabouts and who might even live there.

We soon reached the pedestrianised old town and walked the short distance to our hotel and were enthusiastically welcomed by the rest of the family. The hotel rooms surround a peaceful courtyard where we would eat breakfast. We unpacked and felt a bit dislocated, as though we hadn’t yet arrived. Samarkand was still in our hearts and we hadn’t yet learned how to love Bukhara but we would, and I’ll try to explain why in the next piece.