Tamerlane's birthplace and ancient city — the White Palace ruins, 14th-century monuments, and the best kebabs in Kashkadarya
Shakhrisabz (meaning 'Green City' in Persian) is a small town in the Kashkadarya region of Uzbekistan — 80km south of Samarkand, over the Ak-Darya pass at 1,770m — and the birthplace of Amir Timur (Tamerlane), the 14th-century conqueror who made Samarkand the capital of his empire. The town contains a UNESCO World Heritage Site: the monumental remains of Timur's court — the Ak-Saray Palace (White Palace, 1380–1404), the Kok Gumbaz Mosque (1435), the Dorus Saodat mausoleum, and the Dorus Tilovat complex — built when Shakhrisabz was intended to rival Samarkand as Timur's capital. The Ak-Saray's…
Timur was born in the village of Khoja Ilgar near Shakhrisabz (then called Kesh) in 1336 — the son of a Barlas tribal chief — and spent his career building an empire from Delhi to Ankara, with Samarkand as capital. Despite choosing Samarkand as his capital, Timur built his primary palace (the Ak-Saray) and his dynastic mausoleum (the Dorus Saodat, where his sons are buried — Timur himself is buried in Samarkand's Gur-e-Amir) in Shakhrisabz, his home city. The scale of the Ak-Saray palace was extraordinary — 250m wide, with a 70m-high portal (the current ruins are the lower sections only) — la…