The Ichan Kala or Inner City of Uzbekistan’s Silk Road city Khiva is a living museum with mud brick walls enclosing 50 historic palaces, mosques, mausoleums, and madrasas, as well as 250 old houses, all from the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.
There are four gates at the compass points, with the main entrance being at the West Gate, or Ata Darvaza, where we purchased a combined ticket for the 19 major sites which was valid for 48 hours. Our guide concentrated on the 11 he regarded the most important, and whilst I’d like to be able to tell you a little about each of them, we found they began to blur into a sea of blue, gold and turquoise. Only one or two places required heads to be covered, with scarves being provided, and we only took our shoes off once at the Wrestlers Mausoleum, and shorts were not a problem.
Things I found most striking or remember the most were:
The Kalta Minor Minaret, a stubby, fat minaret with bands of turquoise tiles in different designs. It was begun in 1851 by Mohammed Amin Khan, who wanted to build a minaret so tall, he could see all the way to Bukhara, over 400km away. Unfortunately, he dropped down dead in 1855, leaving it unfinished.
The Juma Mosque was a complete contrast from an abundance of turquoise tiles, with 200+ wooden pillars creating a forest-like interior. They were beautifully carved between the 10th and the 18th centuries, and each was unique, with different patterns, styles, and techniques depending on when they were created.
Many of what were student rooms in the madrasas have been turned into artisan workshops and we saw the making of silk carpets. We also saw wooden stands to hold the Koran which ranged from very simple, to very complicated which could be folded in various ways – all made without nails. In the many souvenir shops and stalls, it was impossible to miss the traditional large hats made from sheepskin and wool.
When the June day time temperatures of 35+ degrees had dropped, we walked the city walls (an extra 20,000 Som or £1.30) with a gate being unlocked to reveal a staircase with a dozen precarious steep steps leading upwards. Unfortunately the walls are incomplete, and having walked from the North to West Gate, had to retrace steps before walking North to East, but it did provide us with a different perspective and apart from one other person, we had the walls to ourselves.
There is no doubt that the city is beautiful, and we enjoyed wandering and getting lost in the network of narrow roads. But to us, its restoration, undertaken between 2014 and 2019 in conjunction with the Chinese, has somehow ‘Disneyfied’ it and removed the heart and soul. Only in one or two places had tiles been partially restored to show the before and after, and one street still had its original cobbles and we felt that was more authentic.