Some names sound like legend before you even arrive, and Samarkand is one of them. A crossroads of Silk Road caravans, capital of Tamerlane's empire, a city of astronomers and silk weavers, its very name conjures up turquoise domes, endless mosaics and deserts crossed by merchants. And the best part is that the real Samarkand doesn't disappoint: when you stand in the middle of Registan square, surrounded by three colossal madrasas covered in blue and gold tiles, you understand why for centuries this city was a byword for everything far away, rich and marvellous.
Samarkand is one of the oldest inhabited cities in Central Asia: it is about 2.750 years old and already existed when Alexander the Great conquered it, under the name Maracanda, in the 4th century BC. But its greatest glory came in the 14th century, when Timur —Tamerlane to the West— made it the capital of an empire stretching from Anatolia to India and filled it with the most ambitious monuments of his time. His grandson Ulugh Beg, prince and astronomer, built one of the most advanced observatories of the medieval world here. That double legacy, of warrior and scholar, still beats in every mosaic.
This guide helps you get around the city with a practical eye: how to arrive on the Afrosiyob high-speed train, what each admission costs, when to see the Registan lit up at night, how to plan Shah-i-Zinda and the observatory, and how to slip away to Shakhrisabz. Samarkand can be seen in two or three intense days, but it stays with you forever: together with Bukhara and Khiva, it is one of the great treasures of the Silk Road and one of those cities every traveller should set foot in at least once.
Samarkand is one of the oldest cities in the world, with more than 2.700 years of continuous history. Founded by the Sogdians as Maracanda, it was conquered by Alexander the Great in 329 BC, flourished as a great Silk Road crossroads between China, Persia and the Mediterranean, and was razed by Genghis Khan in 1220. Its golden age came with Timur (Tamerlane), who in the 14th century made it the capital of his vast empire and filled it with mosques, madrasas and blue-tiled mausoleums, bringing in craftsmen from every land he conquered. His grandson Ulugh Beg also turned it into a first-rate scientific centre, with a famous astronomical observatory. After centuries of decline and the Great Game between empires, the city became part of the Russian empire and then the Soviet Union, which restored its monuments. Today Samarkand, a World Heritage Site, is the symbol of Uzbekistan and of the whole Silk Road; its full history, from Alexander to Tamerlane and from the astronomers to the present day, 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.
Read the history of Silk Road (classic cities) →Some places make no sense on your own; with someone explaining them, they change completely. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 7 activities in Samarcanda. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Have a look below: tap any of them to see them all.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before Tamerlane's blue domes, there was already a city at this junction of routes. On the mound we now call Afrasiyab, to the northeast of present-day Samarkand, stood one of the oldest cities in Central Asia, founded around the 7th century BC by the Sogdians, an Iranian people of brilliant merchants who dominated trade on the Silk Road for centuries. They called it by a name the Greeks transcribed as Maracanda, and even then it was rich, walled and famous for its irrigation.
In 329 BC Alexander the Great arrived here on his advance into the heart of Asia. He conquered Maracanda and used it as a base in his gruelling campaign against the tribes of Sogdiana and Bactria. It is said that it was in this city that the Macedonian conqueror, during a drunken night, killed Cleitus the Black with his own spear. Cleitus was one of his generals and friends, and had once saved his life in battle. The episode became part of Alexander's legend. Alexander was struck by the fertility of the Zeravshan valley; according to a line tradition attributes to him, everything he had heard about Maracanda was true, except that it was even more beautiful than he had been told.
Over the following thousand years, the Sogdian city flourished as one of the great hubs of the Silk Road, through which passed Chinese silk, spices, horses, paper and religions: Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Manichaeism and Nestorian Christianity all coexisted here. The splendid 7th-century frescoes of Afrasiyab, with their foreign embassies and caravans, are living testimony to that cosmopolitan Samarkand before the arrival of Islam.
In the 8th century, Arab armies conquered Sogdiana and brought Samarkand into the Islamic world. The city didn't just survive the change, it prospered. Under the Abbasids and later under local dynasties such as the Samanids, in the 9th and 10th centuries, Samarkand became a great centre of learning, trade and craftsmanship. According to tradition, this is where the secret of papermaking was learned from Chinese prisoners. Samarkand became famous for its very high-quality paper, which was exported across the Islamic world and helped spread knowledge long before Europe knew how to make it.
The city changed hands between Turkic and Persian empires (the Karakhanids, the Seljuks, the Khwarazmian Empire) and remained one of the most populous and wealthy cities in Central Asia, with bazaars, mosques, baths and sophisticated water systems. It seemed untouchable. But in 1220 disaster struck.
That year, the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan fell upon Samarkand during their campaign of extermination against the Khwarazmian Empire. The city held out only briefly: it was taken, looted and largely destroyed, much of its population was massacred or deported, and its irrigation canals were ruined. The old site of Afrasiyab, inhabited for more than fifteen hundred years, was so devastated that it never fully recovered, and over time life moved south, to where present-day Samarkand stands. The city of the Sogdians and of Alexander was finished. It would take another conqueror, a century and a half later, to restore its glory.
The man who made Samarkand one of the most dazzling cities in history was born around 1336 near present-day Shakhrisabz, into a Turco-Mongol tribe. His name was Timur, and an old leg wound earned him the nickname Timur-i-Lang, 'Timur the Lame', which the West corrupted into Tamerlane. From the 1360s onwards, with a mix of military genius, relentless cruelty and political cunning, he subdued the lands of Central Asia one after another and proclaimed himself heir to the legacy of Genghis Khan.
For almost four decades, Timur's armies devastated and conquered an immense territory: Persia, the Caucasus, Mesopotamia, northern India (he sacked Delhi in 1398), Syria and Anatolia, where in 1402 he defeated and captured the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I. His campaigns were extremely violent. The victims are counted in the hundreds of thousands, and the towers of skulls he had built are notorious. But from all those lands he brought back something besides loot: the finest craftsmen, architects, artists and scholars, whom he put to work in his capital.
Timur chose Samarkand as the heart of his empire and wanted to make it the most magnificent city in the world. He ordered mosques, madrasas, palaces and mausoleums built on a colossal scale, decorated with the blue and turquoise tilework that would become his signature. The gigantic Bibi-Khanym Mosque, built with the spoils from India, was meant to be the largest in Islam. He surrounded the city with gardens named after the great capitals of the world (one garden was called Cairo, others Damascus, Baghdad and Sultaniya), as if to make clear that Samarkand outshone them all. Timur died in 1405, on the march to conquer China, and was buried in Samarkand, beneath the turquoise dome of Gur-e Amir, the 'tomb of the king'.
If Timur stands for the Samarkand of war, his grandson Ulugh Beg embodies the city's other face: that of learning. Born in 1394, Ulugh Beg came to rule Samarkand and much of the Timurid empire, but he went down in history less as a sovereign than as one of the greatest astronomers and mathematicians of the entire Middle Ages, in any civilisation.
Ulugh Beg turned Samarkand into a beacon of science. He founded a great madrasa, the one that now dominates Registan Square, where mathematics and astronomy were taught at the highest level, and he drew the finest scholars of his time. Around 1420 he had an extraordinary observatory built on the outskirts of the city. Its monumental sextant had a radius of almost forty metres and was partly cut into the rock of a hill. Without telescopes, which didn't exist yet, and relying only on the precision of their instruments and calculations, Ulugh Beg and his team measured the positions of nearly a thousand stars and compiled astronomical tables, the Zij-i Sultani. These remained a worldwide reference for centuries and were later studied and translated in Europe. He worked out the length of the year with an error of just a few seconds.
His end was tragic, and very much of its time. His devotion to science and his lukewarm religious stance made him enemies among the most conservative factions. In 1449, after a brief conflict, his own son rebelled against him, and Ulugh Beg was killed, beheaded on the orders of his own people while supposedly setting out on pilgrimage. His death marked the start of the decline of Timurid splendour in Samarkand. Fanatics destroyed the observatory, and it lay forgotten underground until Russian archaeologists rediscovered it in the early 20th century. Today a crater on the Moon bears his name, and his life sums up the moment when Samarkand was a scientific capital as well as an imperial one.
After Ulugh Beg's death, Timurid power crumbled. In the early 16th century, the Uzbeks of the Shaybanid dynasty took over Central Asia and the political centre shifted to Bukhara. Samarkand lost its role as capital and entered a long decline. At times it was so neglected that, according to some chronicles, the city was almost deserted in the 18th century, its great monuments cracking and its madrasas empty. Even so, those blue domes were still standing, waiting.
In the 19th century, Samarkand was caught up in the so-called Great Game, the struggle between the Russian Empire and the British Empire for control of Central Asia. Russia advanced relentlessly on the region's khanates, and in 1868 the Tsar's troops took Samarkand, which became part of Russian Turkestan. The arrival of the Trans-Caspian Railway at the end of the century connected the city to Russia and gave it new energy. A new city with a European layout grew up next to the old Muslim quarter.
After the Russian Revolution, the region became part of the Soviet Union. Between 1925 and 1930 Samarkand was even the first capital of the new Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, before that role passed to Tashkent. Soviet rule had an ambivalent relationship with the city's heritage. It repressed religion and transformed society, but it also launched major restoration campaigns that rescued and rebuilt the Timurid monuments, many of which were on the verge of collapse. The leaning minarets of the Registan, for example, were straightened through daring feats of engineering. Much of the splendour visitors admire today is owed to those 20th-century restorations, which saved the legacy of Timur and Ulugh Beg for the future.
When Uzbekistan became independent in 1991, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Samarkand became one of the great symbols of the new country's national identity. Timur, whom the Soviets had treated with suspicion, was reclaimed as founding father and national hero, and his monuments became the emblem Uzbekistan presents to the world. In 2001 UNESCO declared Samarkand a World Heritage Site under the title 'Samarkand – Crossroad of Cultures', recognising its unique value as a record of more than two and a half thousand years of history.
In recent decades the city has gone through an intense, and sometimes controversial, tourism makeover. The great monuments were restored and spruced up, a long pedestrian and landscaped avenue was created to link the main sights, and large tourist complexes such as Silk Road Samarkand were built beside an artificial lake. Some experts and residents have criticised certain projects for sacrificing traditional neighbourhoods and the historic fabric in favour of a more polished, monumental image designed for visitors. It's a tension found at so many heritage sites: preserving the city's authentic life versus presenting a flawless postcard.
Whatever the debates, Samarkand still exerts its old fascination. Stand at sunset in the middle of the Registan, between the three illuminated madrasas, or walk the avenue of mausoleums at Shah-i-Zinda at dawn, and you feel the weight of every era that passed through here: the Sogdian merchants, Alexander's phalanxes, the silk caravans, Genghis's armies, Timur's dazzling court, Ulugh Beg's astronomers. Few cities in the world pack so much history into so little space. That's why Samarkand is more than the jewel of Uzbekistan. For many travellers it is the very name of adventure and faraway places, made of stone and blue tiles.
