May 19 Mosques, medressas and mausoleums

This is just part of the breakfast served st Dilshoda hotel in Samarkand. This is just for us two and you could add porridge and eggs as well. We didn’t!

Seems so much longer, but just 2 days ago we left the breakfast table - a delightful reclining couch affair - with stomachs groaning and headed a mere 100m or so to the mausoleum of Amir Timur in Samarkand. 

Amit Timor’s mausoleum

The detail, colour, design and gold is jaw-dropping! All the walls, domes and ceiling were densely decorated. 

The doors are all very low. This facilitates respect - people have to how to enter. And there’s an elaborate arrangement of locks to signify who is home - women or their own, etc and also who is visiting.

Breathtaking! Alabaster, marble, onyx, gold and ceramic tiles by the mega ton. Timur also known as Tamerlane, brought me to Samarkand. That’s perhaps an exaggeration, but his conquests in and domination of Central Asia and beyond to India, Turkey and Africa intrigued me. 

This is the territory Timor, also known as Tamerlane, conquered. Vast!

He was a tyrant, a despot after the style of the day, cutting a swathe across the continent, sacking and razing cities and countries and amassing treasures as he went; he brought it all back to Samarkand. I read about him in Georgia couple of years ago; he had destroyed citadels etc there too. He rivaled Genghis Khan in terms of his conquests and power. 

Thevategistsn. On the left is the meetessa built by Ulugh Beg. It houses 54 study cell each of which sleeps 4. It is an amazing structure as are the other two.

The dynasty he founded introduced some clever people including grandson Ulugh Beg, an astronomer and scholar, who established many wonderful things such as the mighty medressa of learning in Samarkand and an observatory which I so wanted to see but which sadly has been destroyed. Its remains part of the massive excavations in the old Samarkand - Afrosiab, where we went next.

These are the ruins of the mosque Tomur had built for his favourite wife. It is more impressive to me in its crumbled state - it gives a small inkling of the passage of time. Earthquakes in the late 1800s seriously damaged many large structures. Add to that thevSpviet era and a time of rationalisation. Many have been restored, this one a a little more slowly.

What is this you may be wondering. It’s horse meat and was absolutely delicious. It’s a national dish in Uzbekistan. I think this may have been cured with herbs.  It was served as an entree. We ordered it 3 times while we were in Samarkand..