The Silk Road's living museum — Kalon minaret, plov steaming in kazan pots at Lyabi-Hauz, and an old city whose mud-brick streets have barely changed in 1,000 years
Bukhara is the best-preserved Silk Road city in Central Asia — a UNESCO World Heritage Site whose historic old town of mud-brick architecture, covered bazaars, and ancient mosques has survived relatively intact from the medieval Islamic Golden Age when Bukhara was one of the world's great centres of learning, trade, and culture. The Lyabi-Hauz (Arabic/Persian: 'around the pool') is the social heart of the old city — a 17th-century reflecting pool surrounded by mulberry trees, tea houses, and the covered Toqi Sarrofon bazaar, where merchants once exchanged currency from across Asia. The Kalon…
Bukhara was the capital of the Samanid Empire (819–999 CE) during its Golden Age — Avicenna (Ibn Sina, author of The Canon of Medicine, one of the most influential medical textbooks in history) was born near Bukhara in 980 CE and studied in its royal library. The Ismoil Somoni Mausoleum (907 CE), built for the Samanid dynasty's founder, is the oldest surviving Islamic fired-brick mausoleum in the world and an architectural masterpiece of geometric brickwork that creates different patterns at different times of day as light shifts across the facade. The Mongol invasion of 1220 under Genghis Kh…