🇺🇿 Uzbekistan
Samarkand
Samarkand is the second-largest city of Uzbekistan and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on Earth — a city of 550,000 on the Zerafshan River in the fertile valley between the Kyzylkum Desert and the Pamir Mountains, 270 km southwest of Tashkent. Samarkand is 2,750 years old by scholarly consensus (founded c. 700 BC as Afrasiab, the Sogdian capital) and has been one of the great cities of human civilisation — Alexander the Great conquered it in 329 BC and called it the most beautiful city he had ever seen ("it is indeed as beautiful as I had imagined, but I cannot believe that it is so large and populous as they say" — his only recorded admission that reality exceeded expectation); Samarkand was the capital of the Timurid Empire (1370-1507) under Timur (Tamerlane) and his successor Ulugh Beg — the empire that produced the greatest concentration of Persian-Islamic architecture in history and brought Samarkand to the peak of its cultural power as the largest city in Asia west of China. The three monuments that define Samarkand are: the Registan (the 15th-17th century mosque-madrasa complex — three Timurid/Shaybanid buildings around a single square, the most magnificent civic space in Islamic architecture, whose tile mosaics of deep cobalt, turquoise, gold and white are the finest in the world), the Gur-e-Amir (the mausoleum of Timur, 1404, with its ribbed melon dome in turquoise — the prototype for the Taj Mahal; when Soviet archaeologists opened Timur's tomb in June 1941, a supposed curse warned of a great war; two days later, Germany invaded the Soviet Union), and the Shah-i-Zinda (the necropolis of 11 mausoleums from the 11th-15th centuries — the most intensely tiled street of tombs in the world, with the finest individual tile panels in Central Asia). Samarkand is a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2001.