If Samarkand dazzles with its colossal monuments, Bukhara seduces with its atmosphere. There's no single great monumental square that takes your breath away all at once, but something rarer and harder to find: an almost complete, living medieval Islamic city, with its maze of mud-brick lanes, its madrasas, its minarets, its dome-covered bazaars and its pools in the shade of mulberry trees. Walking through Bukhara at sunset, when the light turns the clay walls golden and the call to prayer sounds from the Kalyan minaret, is one of the most immersive experiences on the whole Silk Road.
For centuries Bukhara was one of the holiest and most learned cities in the Islamic world, nicknamed 'the Noble' and 'the Dome of Islam'. Scholars of the stature of the great physician and philosopher Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and the hadith compiler al-Bukhari were born or worked here; according to tradition, there were more than three hundred mosques and nearly a hundred madrasas. It was the capital of the Samanid empire in the 10th century and, later, of a powerful khanate and emirate that survived into the 20th century, with episodes as grim as they are famous, such as the 'bug pit' where the emir locked up his prisoners.
This guide helps you find your way through that maze with a practical eye: what to see in the Poi Kalyan complex, how to visit the Ark and the Samanid mausoleum, where to have tea at Lyabi-Hauz, what admission costs, how to buy handicrafts without falling into traps and how to slip away to the last emir's summer palace. Bukhara can be explored in two or three relaxed days, and together with Samarkand and Khiva it is one of the country's great treasures: for many, the Silk Road city with the most soul in Central Asia.
Bukhara is one of the oldest and holiest cities in Central Asia, with more than 2.000 years of history. A great crossroads of the Silk Road, it reached its first golden age in the 9th-10th centuries as capital of the Samanid empire, when it was a cultural hub comparable to Baghdad, home of the physician Avicenna and of Islamic scholars. Razed by Genghis Khan in 1220, it was reborn under the Timurids and above all under the Uzbek Shaybanid dynasty in the 16th century, the period from which many of its great madrasas and bazaars date. It later became the capital of the Khanate and then Emirate of Bukhara, an isolated theocratic state that played a part in the Great Game between Russia and Britain, until in 1868 it came under Russian protectorate. The last emir was overthrown in 1920 by the Red Army, and Bukhara became part of the Soviet Union. Its miraculously preserved old town is a World Heritage Site. The full story, from the Samanids and Avicenna to the emirs and the Soviet era, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The legendary heart of Uzbekistan: Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva and Shakhrisabz, the great caravan cities whose blue-tiled mosques, madrasas and mausoleums hold two thousand years of history and are World Heritage Sites.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Some cities are born beside a river or a port; Bukhara was born from an oasis on the edge of the desert. In the lower Zeravshan valley, where the river fades away before reaching the Kyzylkum desert, water and irrigation allowed one of the oldest and most enduring settlements in Central Asia to flourish more than two thousand years ago. According to some interpretations, the name Bukhara itself may come from a word meaning 'lucky place', or from a Sanskrit-rooted term linked to monasteries, because before Islam the region knew Zoroastrianism and Buddhism too.
From very early on, Bukhara was a key piece of the Silk Road, the network of routes along which Chinese silk, spices, metals, horses, ideas and religions travelled between China, India, Persia and the Mediterranean. The Sogdian merchants, the same people who dominated Samarkand, turned Bukhara into a trading hub and a cosmopolitan crossroads, where languages, faiths and caravans from half the world lived side by side.
In the 8th century Arab armies arrived, and with them came Islam, which put down very deep roots in the city. Bukhara embraced Islam thoroughly and soon became a religious centre of the first rank: people began to call it 'the Noble' (Bukhara-i-sharif) and 'the Dome of Islam', and according to the chronicles it came to have hundreds of mosques and dozens of madrasas. This is where the scholar al-Bukhari compiled his famous hadith collections, making him one of the most revered authorities of Sunni Islam. The holy city of the desert was beginning to forge its legend.
Bukhara's first great golden age came in the 9th and 10th centuries, when it became the capital of the Samanid empire, a Persian dynasty that ruled much of Central Asia and eastern Iran. Under the Samanids, Bukhara was far more than a trading post: it was one of the cultural capitals of the Islamic world, and its brilliance was compared with Baghdad's. Its court drew poets, scientists, physicians, theologians and philosophers, and its library was legendary for its riches. This was when poetry in modern Persian flourished, with figures such as Rudaki, considered the father of that literature.
The perfect symbol of that splendour is the Samanid Mausoleum, built around the year 900: a brick cube crowned by a dome, with a geometric perfection and an elegance so modern that it's hard to believe it is more than a thousand years old. It is one of the oldest and most refined buildings in all of Islamic architecture, and it survived almost miraculously because it lay half-buried under the sand.
That learned Bukhara also produced one of the greatest minds in the history of science and philosophy: Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna, born near the city around 980. A child prodigy, Avicenna used the Samanids' extraordinary library to educate himself. He was a physician, philosopher, astronomer and polymath; his great medical work, the Canon of Medicine, was studied for centuries in the universities of Europe and the Islamic world, and his philosophy influenced thinkers on both sides. That a scholar of his stature was formed in Bukhara says a lot about what the city was at the time: a beacon of knowledge in the heart of Asia.
Like almost every great city in the region, Bukhara met its catastrophe in 1220, when the armies of Genghis Khan swept across Central Asia. The city was captured, looted and burned, and much of its population was massacred or enslaved. According to tradition, Genghis Khan rode into the great mosque on horseback and told the terrified inhabitants that he was God's punishment for their sins. Amid all that destruction, however, the great Kalyan minaret was left standing: legend has it that the conqueror was so impressed by its height and beauty that he ordered it spared.
Bukhara recovered slowly. Under the Timurids, in the 14th and 15th centuries, it regained some of its importance, although the centre of Timur's power was in Samarkand. The real revival came in the 16th century, when the Uzbek Shaybanid dynasty conquered the region and made Bukhara its capital. It was a new golden age of building: many of the great madrasas, mosques and covered bazaars that visitors admire today went up, and the city filled with religious and intellectual life. The old town we know today, with its maze of alleys, its trading domes and its dozens of monuments, largely took shape in this period.
Over time, that power gave rise to the Khanate of Bukhara, a state that dominated much of Central Asia. The city remained a major centre of Sunni Islam and a key market, with caravans arriving from Russia, Persia, India and China. But, closed in on its religious orthodoxy and cut off from the changes shaking the world, Bukhara was starting to drift to the margins of history, while in Europe and Russia the forces that would eventually come knocking at its gates were taking shape.
In the late 18th century a new dynasty, the Manghits, turned the khanate into the Emirate of Bukhara, a theocratic, conservative and isolated state ruled by emirs with absolute power. It was in this period that the city and its court earned their darkest reputation among European travellers, who were equally fascinated and horrified by what they saw. The emirs' power was despotic, justice was brutal, and the Ark citadel, the symbol of that power, hid fearsome dungeons, including the notorious 'bug pit' or 'toad pit', a vermin-infested hole into which prisoners were thrown.
In the 19th century Bukhara was caught up in the so-called Great Game, the long struggle between the Russian and British empires for influence in Central Asia, between the borders of British India and Russia's advance. The city was the setting for one of its most sinister episodes: in 1842 Emir Nasrullah Khan had two British officers executed, Colonels Charles Stoddart and Arthur Conolly — the latter is credited with coining the very phrase 'the Great Game' — after they had been held in that pit for years. Their beheading, after terrible suffering, shocked British public opinion and became one of the symbols of the dangers of that diplomacy of spies and adventurers.
Russia's advance proved unstoppable. After defeating the emirate's forces, in 1868 Russia imposed a treaty on Bukhara that made it a protectorate: the emir kept his throne and his court, but under the tsar's supervision. So while Samarkand and Tashkent were fully absorbed into Russian Turkestan, Bukhara survived as a curious vassal state, a piece of the Islamic Middle Ages running in the shadow of a European empire, well into the 20th century.
The end of the old world came with the Russian Revolution. After the fall of the tsar and the outbreak of the civil war, the Bolsheviks spread their power across Central Asia. The last emir of Bukhara, Alim Khan, tried to hold out and keep his state independent, but in 1920 the Red Army, led by Mikhail Frunze, attacked the city. The Ark citadel was bombarded and largely destroyed, and the emir was forced to flee; he ended up in exile in Afghanistan, where he died years later. With him ended more than a thousand years of emirates and khanates: the theocratic state of Bukhara ceased to exist.
In its place a short-lived Bukharan People's Soviet Republic was proclaimed first, and soon afterwards the region was absorbed into the Soviet Union. In 1924, when Central Asia was reorganised into republics along ethnic lines, Bukhara became part of the new Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. Soviet rule radically transformed life in the city: it closed madrasas, repressed religion, secularised society and filled in most of the old town's ponds (hauz), which were breeding grounds for disease. On paper, the old holy city of Islam became just another Soviet city.
And yet, paradoxically, it was also under the Soviets that Bukhara's heritage began to be studied, protected and restored on scientific principles. Archaeologists and architects rescued monuments such as the Samanid Mausoleum and stabilised minarets and madrasas, and the old town, which had escaped the large-scale modernising demolitions seen in other cities, was preserved with extraordinary integrity. Bukhara entered the second half of the 20th century as a time capsule: one of the few medieval Islamic cities in the world to have survived almost intact.
With Uzbekistan's independence in 1991, Bukhara was free to reclaim its Muslim identity and its role as a major cultural destination. In 1993 UNESCO declared the city's historic centre a World Heritage Site, recognising it as the best-preserved example of a medieval Central Asian city, with its urban layout and its group of monuments practically intact. You rarely get to walk through an Islamic old town as complete and authentic as Bukhara's.
In recent decades the city has thrown itself into tourism, with boutique hotels set up in restored madrasas and traditional houses, craft workshops keeping centuries-old trades alive — carpets, silk, suzanis, copper, knives — and a quiet nightlife around Lyabi-Hauz, with dinners and dance shows in the courtyards of the old Koranic schools. As in Samarkand, some warn that so much tourist prettification could turn the city into a stage set; but for now Bukhara keeps a life of its own and an unhurried pace that many travellers find more endearing than that of its famous neighbour.
Exploring Bukhara is a journey through all its eras at once. In a single walk you go from the 10th-century Samanid mausoleum to the minaret that amazed Genghis Khan, from the Shaybanid madrasas to the Silk Road trading domes, from the emirs' citadel to the kitsch palace of the last of them. And all of it among mud-brick alleys where you can still hear the call to prayer, watch a blacksmith or a weaver at work, and drink tea in the shade of a mulberry tree beside a centuries-old pond. That's why Bukhara isn't just a catalogue of monuments: it is perhaps the Silk Road city that most resembles what it once was, and one of the most immersive experiences Central Asia has to offer.
