Bukhara

Bukhara grew on the last stretch of the Zarafshan, where the river dies in the sand before reaching the Amu Darya, and the water of its oasis made it a market long before it was a capital. A walled town stood here in the first centuries AD, ruled by Sogdian lords whose country town at Varakhsha, west of the modern city, has left painted palace walls. Arab armies took the city in the early 8th century, and Islam replaced the mixture of Zoroastrian, Buddhist and Manichaean worship that had shared the oasis.

Its greatest age began in the 9th and 10th centuries under the Samanids, who ruled Transoxiana from Bukhara and made it a centre of Persian letters and Islamic learning; the small brick mausoleum of the dynasty still stands in the park. Ibn Sina, the physician known in Europe as Avicenna, was born near the city and studied in its libraries. Karakhanid rulers built the Kalyan minaret in 1127. Genghis Khan's army destroyed the city in 1220, sparing the minaret, and it was rebuilt in the centuries that followed.

Under the Shaybanids from the 16th century Bukhara became a khanate capital again, and the trading domes, the great madrasas and much of the present old town date from that time. The Emirate of Bukhara that followed became a Russian protectorate after 1868 and kept its emir until the Red Army took the city in 1920 and the last ruler fled to Afghanistan. Soviet rule brought a new city beside the old one; since independence the historic centre has been restored, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, and turned towards tourism.

Bukhara's culture is layered in a way few cities of its size are. It is a Tajik-speaking city in an Uzbek country, and the Persian inheritance shows in its poetry, its music and the names of its dishes. It was also one of the great centres of Islamic scholarship in the region, and the Mir-i-Arab madrasa on the Kalyan square has trained students almost continuously since the 16th century. The Naqshbandi Sufi order takes its name from Bahauddin Naqshband, who lived and was buried near the city, and his shrine outside it is a major pilgrimage place.

For many centuries Bukhara was home to the Bukharan Jews, a Persian-speaking Jewish community with its own dialect, liturgy and quarter of courtyard houses in the old town. Most emigrated to Israel and the United States after 1991, leaving a synagogue, a cemetery and a string of house names behind; their music, the shashmaqom tradition, is still performed in the city that helped shape it.

Crafts remain an everyday trade rather than a museum subject. Suzani embroidery, worked in bold silk stitches on cotton, is a Bukhara speciality; so are gold embroidery, carpet weaving, miniature painting, knife-making and metalwork, much of it sold from the workshops of the domed bazaars. Manners are formal and warm at once: a hand on the heart with a greeting, insistent hospitality, and respect for elders that shapes how a room is arranged and who speaks first.

About 305,000 people live in Bukhara, and the majority of them are in the Soviet-era and newer districts east and north of the monuments rather than in the old town, though the historic lanes remain genuinely inhabited — children walk to school past 16th-century walls and washing hangs in courtyards beside madrasas. Uzbek is the official language, Tajik the mother tongue of many old families, and Russian is common in offices and shops.

Tourism now shapes a large part of the economy, with guesthouses, restaurants, craft workshops and guiding work concentrated in the historic centre. Beyond it the province lives from irrigated farming — cotton, wheat, melons and karakul sheep — along with textile plants, a gas-processing industry and, at Kagan, the railway. Many young people work seasonally in Russia or Tashkent, and remittances matter to household budgets.

The rhythm of the day starts early, with the bazaar busiest soon after dawn and the midday hours spent indoors through the hot months. Evenings belong to the pools and parks, where families walk and eat ice cream until late. Water is the city's long-running problem: the Zarafshan is heavily drawn on upstream, salinity affects the farmland, and rising groundwater in the old town damages ancient brickwork. Balancing restoration and mass visits against the needs of the people who still live among the monuments is a recurring local argument.

Bukhara's cooking is a desert-oasis cuisine of mutton, rice, bread and fruit, with a Persian accent. Its plov, the rice pilaf cooked with mutton, carrots and cumin in a wide kazan, differs from Samarkand's and from Tashkent's in the order the layers go in and in the raisins and chickpeas that often join it. Grilled shashlik of mutton or liver, shurpa broth with big pieces of meat and vegetables, and manti — steamed dumplings of minced lamb and onion — appear on most tables, along with samsa baked against the wall of a tandoor.

Bread is central and treated with respect: the round tandoor non, stamped in the centre with a chekich to keep it flat, is broken by hand and never cut or set upside down. Bukhara's own version is thinner and saltier than Samarkand's famous glossy loaf. Salads are simple — tomato, onion and herbs, or the shredded radish and carrot dishes served alongside meat — and yoghurt, both fresh and dried into hard qurt balls, accompanies many meals.

Green tea is drunk through the day, poured back into the pot three times before it is served, and sweetened with navat, crystals of grape sugar on a string. Sweets lean on nuts and sesame: halva in many textures, sugared almonds and dried apricots, figs and raisins sold by weight in the bazaars. The oasis and the Zarafshan valley behind it grow melons and grapes that Uzbeks rank among the best in the country, and in the desert beyond the city herders still drink chal, fermented camel's milk.