Samarkand

Samarkand is the picture most people carry of Uzbekistan before they arrive, and the Registan does not disappoint it. Three madrasas face one another across a square, their portals tiled in blue, turquoise and gold, raised over two centuries from Ulugh Beg onwards. Come at dawn, when the square is empty and the tiles hold the first light, and come back in the evening, when the lamps are lit.

The city was Timur’s capital, and his buildings set the scale. Gur-e-Amir, where he lies beneath a ribbed turquoise dome, is small and intense; Bibi-Khanym, the mosque that bears his wife’s name, was once among the largest in the Islamic world. Along a narrow stairway on the slope of Afrosiab, the mausoleums of Shah-i-Zinda hold the finest tilework in the country, each façade a different answer to the same question. On a hill above the city, the remains of Ulugh Beg’s observatory record a prince who measured the stars.

Samarkand is a living city rather than a museum, and the best of it lies between the monuments: Siab Bazaar beside Bibi-Khanym, the shaded streets of the nineteenth-century town, a courtyard lunch of samsa and green tea. Two hours from Tashkent by the Afrosiyob train, it is the city we build most journeys around. Two nights let it breathe and three are better, with Shakhrisabz over the pass for the third day.