Holy City of Bukhara
Description:
Sacred Bukhara - this is how Uzbeks respectfully call this glorious city. An ancient belief says that grace-filled light descends from the sky on all Muslim cities, and only over Bukhara it rises to the sky. The city is not for nothing called the “support of Islam”. An unprecedented number of mosques are concentrated here, as well as the tombs of many Islamic saints.
Indeed, Bukhara is not inferior to Samarkand in the abundance and importance of holy places and architectural masterpieces. And all because Bukhara is also very old: more than 2000 years it stands under the scorching Asian sun, becoming during this time a witness of both devastating wars, each time rising from the ashes, and glorious times, when the city was a major center of the Great Silk Road and the capital of the great Samanid state. It was these Persian rulers who ennobled the appearance of Bukhara, erecting here beautiful palaces, tombs, caravanserai, madrassas, mosques. The symbols of the city were the cult buildings of this period - the Kalyan minaret, the Samanid mausoleum and others. But the modern architectural appearance of the eastern city of Bukhara acquired, being the capital of the Shaybanids and Ashtarkhanids, in the XVI-XVII centuries.
To this day, the walls of the Arch - an ancient citadel and more than 140 monuments, each with its own unique style of construction, amazing quarters and narrow streets of the old city, where entire areas of the ancient layout have been preserved. Here it is easy to imagine yourself a contemporary of the legendary Khoja Nasruddin. An American historian once said, “If you walk down the streets of the old city, you’ll feel like you’re walking through the pages of history.”
Bukhara is a city of poetry and fairy tales. Here legends hover over the zigzags of street ribbons, here in the verticals of minarets is the flight of human genius, and every stone in the lace of masonry is covered with the dust of eternity.
In the early 90s, the historical center of Bukhara was included in the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage List. Thus, most of the city is an architectural monument.