Some places look made up, like stage sets too perfect to be real, and Khiva is one of them. You walk through the mud-brick walls of Itchan Kala and suddenly face a forest of minarets, turquoise domes, mosaic portals and golden clay alleys. It's hard to believe it's a real city and not something out of a fairy tale. But it is real. Khiva's inner city is an intact walled town, the best preserved on the whole Silk Road, a time capsule in the middle of the Central Asian desert.
Khiva was the capital of the Khanate of Khiva, one of the states that ruled this region of Khorezm. For centuries it was a crossroads for caravans. It also had a darker side: it was one of Asia's great slave markets, supplied by Turkmen raiders who captured Persians and Russians. Isolated, feared and hard to reach across the surrounding deserts, it held out against the advance of empires for a long time, until it fell into Russia's orbit in the 19th century. All that past, both its splendour and its brutality, is still present within its walls.
This guide helps you plan your visit in a practical way. It covers how to get to this remote corner of the country, what the Itchan Kala combined ticket includes and what to see inside the walls. It also explains why it's worth staying overnight to experience the city at night and at dawn, and how to get around between Urgench and Khiva. You can see it in one or two days, but it leaves an unforgettable impression. Together with Samarkand and Bukhara, Khiva completes the great triangle of the Uzbek Silk Road, and it may be the most photogenic and surprising of the three.
Khiva is an ancient city in the Khorezm region of western Uzbekistan, with more than two thousand years of history tied to the Silk Road. Legend has it that it was founded around a well dug by Shem, son of Noah. It was part of the prosperous ancient civilisation of Khorezm, which Genghis Khan destroyed in the 13th century. From the 16th century it became the capital of the Khanate of Khiva, a powerful Central Asian state. For centuries it was a caravan crossroads and, at its darkest, one of the largest slave markets in the region. In the 19th century it found itself at the centre of the Great Game between Russia and Britain. In 1873 the Russian Empire conquered it and made it a protectorate. After the Russian Revolution the khanate was abolished and the region became part of the Soviet Union, which restored the walled centre and turned it into a museum city. In 1990 its inner city, Itchan Kala, became the first site in Uzbekistan to be declared a World Heritage Site. You'll find the full story, from ancient Khorezm to the khans and the Soviet era, 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.
Read the history of Silk Road (classic cities) →If you book from here we earn a commission and you pay no more. Prices and availability come from Civitatis.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before Khiva existed as we know it, this land already had a very long history. The surrounding region is called Khorezm (Khwarazm), a fertile oasis watered by the Amu Darya river in the middle of the Central Asian deserts, and it was the cradle of one of the oldest civilisations in the region. As early as the first millennium BC, the Khorezmians built walled cities and colossal mud-brick fortresses in the open desert (the so-called 'fortresses of Khorezm', whose ruins can still be visited near Khiva). They developed irrigation, minted coins and had their own language, their own calendar and their own scholars.
Legend gives Khiva a biblical and romantic origin. The story goes that the city grew up around a well called Kheivak, dug by Shem, the son of Noah, whose sweet water is said to have given life to the oasis and its name to the city. Myth aside, there have been settlements at this crossroads of trade routes for more than two thousand years, and for centuries Khiva was one of the stops for Silk Road caravans crossing Khorezm on their way to Persia, Russia or China.
Like the rest of the region, Khorezm became Islamic after the Arab conquest and went through periods of great cultural splendour. In the 12th and 13th centuries, under the Khwarazmian Empire, it became one of the great powers of the eastern Islamic world. One of the most influential scientists in history came from here: the mathematician and astronomer al-Khwarizmi, whose name gave us the word 'algorithm' and whose work introduced algebra to the world. That splendour, however, was about to collide with the greatest catastrophe of the age.
In the early 13th century, the powerful Khwarazmian Empire made the fatal mistake of provoking Genghis Khan by executing a group of Mongol envoys. The response was devastating. Between 1220 and 1221, the Mongol armies laid waste to Khorezm with legendary violence. Entire cities were destroyed, their people wiped out, and the irrigation systems that sustained life in the oasis were ruined. It took the region generations to recover from that blow, one of the most brutal of the entire Mongol expansion.
Over time, however, life returned to the oasis. After centuries of rule by various Mongol and Timurid dynasties, Uzbek tribes arrived in the region in the 16th century and founded the Khanate of Khiva. It was one of the three great states that would divide Central Asia between them, along with Bukhara and, later, Kokand. Over the 17th century the old capital, Kunya-Urgench, declined, partly abandoned after the river changed course, and Khiva became the capital of the khanate. That was when the monumental walled city we admire today began to take shape.
During the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, the khans of Khiva adorned Itchan Kala with the madrasas, mosques, minarets and palaces that give it its present-day appearance. It was an era of artistic splendour, when Khiva's blue-and-white tilework reached exceptional quality. It was also an era of isolation, with an economy that depended largely on a trade as lucrative as it was sinister: the slave trade.
Khiva's prosperity rested on a terrible foundation. For centuries, the khanate was one of the largest centres of the slave trade in Central Asia. The Turkmen tribes who controlled the surrounding deserts lived by raiding (the so-called alaman). They captured travellers, farmers and villagers to sell in the markets of Khiva and Bukhara. Most of their captives were Shia Persians, whom the khanate's Sunni orthodoxy regarded as heretics, but Russians and other peoples were taken too.
Tens of thousands of slaves passed through Khiva and were put to work in the oasis fields, on construction sites and in domestic service. Conditions were extremely harsh, and escape attempts were punished cruelly. This trade, and the danger that Turkmen raids brought to the routes, gave Khiva a grim and fearsome reputation, far removed from its tourist image today. In the 19th century, accounts from freed Russian slaves stirred up strong outrage in Russia and served, among other things, as a justification for military intervention.
That reputation as an isolated and dangerous slave market also made Khiva an almost mythical and inaccessible place for Europeans. Reaching the city, shielded by hundreds of kilometres of unforgiving desert, was a real feat. Several adventurers and spies who tried it during the Great Game, the rivalry between the Russian and British empires for control of Central Asia, died on the way or ended up as prisoners. In the 19th-century imagination, Khiva was one of the last forbidden corners of the world.
The Russian Empire's advance into Central Asia in the 19th century eventually reached Khiva. A first attempt in 1717 failed when the Khivans wiped out a Russian expedition sent by Peter the Great. Then came decades of tension and of outrage over the fate of Russian slaves, and in 1873 Russia mounted a major military campaign against the khanate. Several columns converged on Khiva across the desert, and this time the city could not hold out. It was taken by the troops of General Kaufman.
Khan Muhammad Rahim II was forced to sign a treaty that turned Khiva into a Russian protectorate. The slave trade was officially abolished and thousands of captives were freed, a profound change for life in the oasis. The khan kept his throne and much of his internal authority as a vassal ruler, but the khanate lost its independence and came under the tsar's control, just as had happened with the neighbouring Emirate of Bukhara. That conquest was one of the decisive episodes of the Great Game and consolidated Russian rule over the whole of Central Asia.
Under Russian control, in the first decades of the 20th century, Khiva even saw some attempts at modernisation. These were driven by reformist viziers such as Islam Khodja, who promoted schools, a hospital, the telegraph and the postal service, and who gave his name to the city's tallest minaret. But those reforms ran into resistance from the most conservative factions, and Islam Khodja was assassinated. The old order of the khanate, isolated and stuck in the past, was living on borrowed time. The revolution shaking Russia was about to reach the oasis too.
After the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the civil war that followed, Bolshevik power spread across Central Asia. In 1920 the Khanate of Khiva was abolished and replaced by a short-lived Khorezm People's Soviet Republic, which a few years later was absorbed into the Soviet Union like the rest of the region. When Central Asia was reorganised into republics along ethnic lines in 1924, the Khiva area became part of the new Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. So ended centuries of khans and a world that had barely changed in generations.
The Soviet era completely transformed life in the region. It brought land collectivisation, campaigns against religion, literacy, industrialisation and a reckless push for cotton growing, which in the long run had catastrophic ecological consequences for all of Central Asia as the Aral Sea dried up. At the same time, the Soviet authorities made a decision that proved crucial for Khiva's future as a tourist destination. They declared Itchan Kala, the walled inner city, a protected historic ensemble and effectively turned it into a museum city.
From the 1960s and 1970s onwards, large restoration and consolidation campaigns were carried out on the monuments. Part of the population living inside the walls was moved out, and the whole ensemble was turned into a museum. Thanks to that effort, and to the fact that Khiva, remote and never bombed, had preserved its old town better than almost any other city, Itchan Kala has come down to us as the most complete and intact example of a traditional walled city in Central Asia. In 1990 it became the first site in Uzbekistan to be inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List.
With Uzbekistan's independence in 1991, Khiva established itself as one of the country's great tourist destinations, the third point of the Silk Road's golden triangle along with Samarkand and Bukhara. Its advantage is also what makes it unique. The other two are large, living cities with their monuments spread out. Khiva offers something different and very powerful: the experience of stepping into a whole walled city packed into one enclosed space, where every alley leads to a minaret or a madrasa and it's easy to feel you've gone back several centuries.
For some, that perfection has a downside. Some people criticise Khiva for feeling like a museum that's a little too polished, almost a theme park. Much of the original population has been moved outside the walls, and many buildings have become souvenir shops, hotels or restaurants. It's the usual tension at major heritage sites between preserving the stones and preserving the life around them. Even so, anyone who stays the night inside the walls discovers that in the evening, once the day-trippers leave, Itchan Kala regains a priceless silence and atmosphere.
Today Khiva is also a base for exploring the Khorezm region and its astonishing desert fortresses (Ayaz Kala, Toprak Kala), which bear witness to that ancient oasis civilisation. But its greatest treasure is the city itself. Climbing to the top of the citadel or the Islam Khodja minaret at sunset and looking out, in the golden light, over a sea of turquoise domes and mud-brick towers ringed by endless desert is one of the most unforgettable sights Central Asia has to offer. More than anywhere else in Uzbekistan, Khiva is a journey through time in the shape of a city.
