SHAHRISABZ, UZBEKISTAN: AK-SARAY PALACE AND AMIR TIMUR

As we finished our visit to Kok Bumbaz Mosque in Shahrisabz, Uzbekistan, in the distance we noticed two crumbling towers. They turned out to be our next destination.

This is what remains of Ak-Saray, the Mongol conqueror Timur's summer palace and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000:

Of everything Timur built, Ak-Saray ("the White Palace") was planned to be the most magnificent. Construction began in about 1380 and took roughly 25 years to complete. According this this site, the exterior measurements of the entire palace are not known, but the main inner courtyard was about 400 x 800 feet. A football field is about 160 feet wide and 350 feet long, so the courtyard was bigger than four football fields!  If the courtyard was that enormous, imagine the size of the entire palace!

The entrance gate, the only part still standing, once towered 230 feet (over 20 stories) and was a symbol of Timur's power. Our guide had a drawing of what experts thought it looked like. It must have been stunning.

SHAHRISABZ, UZBEKISTAN: KOK GUMBAZ MOSQUE, DORUT TILAVAT MAUSOLEUM, AND THE JAHONGIR-OMAR SHEIKH MAUSOLEUM

Scheherazade, sometimes called Shahrazad, is the fictional wife of an Arabian sultan and the storyteller in One Thousand and One Nights, the book that contains the tales of Aladdin, Ali Baba, Sinbad, and others. What does that have to do Uzbekistan? Nothing, I think, except for the fact that the name of an Uzbek city we visited, Shahrisabz, sounds so much like Scheherazade/Shahrazad.  Scheherazade also looks like she belongs in Uzbekistan. (At least she does in this 19th century painting by Sophie Anderson.) I guess that's just my untrained ear. What do I know about Arabic? Nothing.  

Also, Shahrisabz (the city in Uzbekistan) has a mysterious aura, a sense of having walked into an enchanted land from a distant time. Indeed, the city was founded over 2,700 years ago, was conquered by Alexander the Great over 2,300 years ago, and was the place where Alexander met his wife Roxanna. It was the birthplace of Timur in 1336 and the site of much intrigue in the following years. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see a flying carpet or a genii floating overhead.

Okay, maybe I would, but it's a pretty magical place all the same. 

We started at the Kok Gumbaz Mosque, built by Ulugbek (the grandson of Timur and a much nicer guy than his grandfather) in 1435 to honor his father. The unimaginative translation of "Kok Gumbaz" is "blue dome."

That's not paint on the dome--it is azure tiles. It looks like and airy, but the engineering that supports such heavy covering must be pretty complex. A light stripe containing excerpts from the Quran surahs runs around the base of the dome.

View from the back. Do you see the large vertical piece in front of the dome on the other side?

KAMASHI, UZBEKISTAN, PART 2: A MOUNTAIN DRIVE TO THE KATTA LANGAR MOSQUE

The great philosopher Minnie Pearl (okay, so she wasn't a philosopher, but comedians tend to know more about life than a lot of people) once said, "Take the back roads instead of the highways."  I wonder why she said that? Had she been to Uzbekistan?

Because that's just what we did. If this isn't a back road, I don't know what is.

After we'd been entertained and fed at a home in what was already a remote village, we went out to the street to see a line-up of a couple dozen cars. Our tour company had arranged for private vehicles driven by their owners, residents of the village, to haul us up the mountain. They must have connected with every car owner for miles around to find transportation for all of us. (The tour company owner, who was on the trip with us, made a point of telling us that they'd worked on these travel plans well into the previous night, and that this side trip was unique to Fun for Less Tours and not something other tours did.) Four of us hopped into a five-passenger sedan being driven by a local man who spoke zero English. We put on our seat belts (where available) and headed up the road. Our friends were in other similar vehicles.

It was an exercise in trust, let me tell you.

We climbed steadily up hill on what was sometimes a paved road and at other times was just a road. The locals have their reasons for choosing alternate means of transportation:

It's not like we were in the middle of nowhere. Of course not.

The scenery was so stark. There was little vegetation, and yet there were homes and other structures along the road most of the time.

KAMASHI, UZBEKISTAN, PART 1: FRIDA KAHLO MEETS FRED ASTAIRE

On our second day in Uzbekistan, we took buses to a village named Kamashi. Adobe houses, some with windows and some without, some solitary and others in small clusters, were spread out over dusty hills. Cattle and donkeys roamed freely, and everything was coated with a film of gray-brown dirt.

The farmers in the area live in compounds. As many as 100 family members live in the same area and work together, and the youngest son is given the responsibility of caring for the matriarch.

We were greeted as we got off the bus by residents of the village:

They directed us to pass through an open garage area where six older women danced to a welcome song. All wore similar bright clothing and broad smiles, and they all had gold teeth:

One woman clacked together two lacquer spoons in each hand, and another tapped china saucers with something metal she wore on her fingertips:

TASHKENT, UZBEKISTAN: A PERFORMANCE BY THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF TRADITIONAL UZBEK MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS

On our first evening in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, we went to a concert in a small concert hall:

It had been a very long day and we were tired. I was envisioning struggling to stay awake as we listened to an average group of musicians play average music.

Not even close.

To start out, they had a lovely narrator who announced the numbers for us. She has the typical Uzbek features:

TASHKENT, UZBEKISTAN: HAST IMAM SQUARE AND A MAUSOLEUM, A MOSQUE, A MUSEUM, AND MORE ENCOUNTERS WITH THE LOCALS

Our next stop was Hast Imam Square, the religious center of Tashkent.

We stopped first at the Mausoleum of Abu Bakr Kaffal Shoshi, the first imam of Tashkent who lived in the 10th century. He was an expert on the Quran, a polyglot, a scientist, a poet, a craftsman and a teacher.   

I love this shade of what I would call either cyan or robin egg blue. The dome rises from a band of intricate mosaic patterns:

Looking at the dome from another angle reveals the thin, vertical slab that surrounds the front door, a Western Asia architectural style we would see again and again.  I read a description that said the mausoleum "acquired its modern shape in 1541." They have a very different definition of "modern" than I do.

TASHKENT, UZBEKISTAN: EARTHQUAKES, WARS, AND CLOSE ENCOUNTERS WITH THE LOCALS

We began our journey through Uzbekistan in the capital city of Tashkent, the most populous city in Central Asia (2.5 million people). Its written history goes back 2200 years, and it has been conquered several times, including a complete destruction by Genghis Khan in 1219. After being rebuilt, it became part of the profitable trade on the Silk Road, and in 1865 it fell to the Russian Empire. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Tashkent was the fourth largest city in the USSR and one of the centers of science and technology. 

The word "Tashkent" comes from the Turkic language and loosely translates to "city of stone," which seemed to us to be an appropriate name for this city that has survived so much. 

On April 26, 1966, Tashkent was hit by a 5.1 magnitude earthquake, not huge by California standards, but the seismic activity was so deep that it was ranked somewhere between an 8 and a 9 on the earth's surface. The epicenter was also in the downtown area and destroyed 80% of the city.

The Monument of Courage Earthquake Memorial was built in 1976 (the 10th anniversary of the quake) by the Soviets in their typical Brutalist style--larger than life forceful figures with smooth, simple surfaces. This couple faces the fissure in the ground in front of them, the man shielding the woman, and the woman's arm outstretched as if to push away the force that is threatening them:


The surface they are standing on has also been ruptured by the earthquake:


At first I did not see the child in the woman's other arm. He clings to her, but her resolute face and stance seem to insure his safety: