Shrines and sacred places

The shrines of Uzbekistan are places where people still come to pray, and that is the way in. Seen as monuments they are tilework; seen in use they are something else. In Tashkent, the Hazrati Imam complex is where the old city prays, and its library keeps one of the oldest Qur’ans in the world. Shah-i-Zinda in Samarkand is a street of tombs that grew around the shrine of Qusam ibn Abbas, a cousin of the Prophet, and pilgrims still climb its stairway. Outside Bukhara, the mausoleum of Bahauddin Naqshband, founder of the Naqshbandi order, sits in its courtyards beside a pool, and is rarely empty. At Nurata the Chashma spring rises beside a mosque into a clear pool, where the water is held sacred and the fish are left alone. Further off, the hill of Mizdakhan outside Khodjeyli, in Karakalpakstan, has been a burial ground for more than two thousand years. At Dorus Saodat in Shakhrisabz is the crypt Timur prepared for himself. He never lay in it: he is in Samarkand, under the dome of Gur-e-Amir.

The manners are simple, and worth setting out plainly. Shoes come off where others have taken theirs off. Shoulders and knees stay covered, and women carry a light scarf for the inside of a mosque or a mazar, the word used here for a shrine. Nobody at prayer is photographed without being asked first. Thursday evenings and Fridays are the busiest times, when the courtyards fill with families; they are not the quietest hours, but they are often the most moving. Your private guide reads the inscriptions over the doorways and on the tombs, and knows when to say nothing.

What we arrange is mostly a matter of hours and company. The visits are timed for the quiet of the day: Hazrati Imam early, while the square is still cool; Shah-i-Zinda late in the afternoon, when the groups have thinned and the light is low on the tiles; Naqshband first thing, or on a Thursday evening if you would rather see it full. The guide matters more here than on most days: ours can explain the Sufi orders and tell one Timurid tomb from another without turning the morning into a lecture, and know which questions keep for the car. None of this is a separate programme. It runs as a thread through the journeys that carry it, so that an hour in a courtyard where people are praying sits naturally between the bazaar and the train. Tell your travel designer it matters, and we will give it the time it needs.