Samarkand has been rebuilt on its own rubble for 2,750 years: Sogdian frescoes buried in a hill, Timur's dynastic necropolises, a tsarist grid west of the old walls. Three days tracing those layers in order, from Afrasiab's ashes to a shrine finished in 2018.
The 220-hectare mound of pre-Mongol Samarkand, burned by Genghis Khan in 1220 and never resettled. The museum's centrepiece is the 7th-century Ambassadors' Fresco from a Sogdian palace, found in 1965. Open 09:00–18:00.
Timur's grandson sank a 40-metre marble sextant into this hillside around 1420 and computed the stellar year to within 25 seconds of the modern value. Vyatkin rediscovered the buried arc in 1908; 11 metres of it survive underground.
Roughly forty tombs stacked along a stepped lane, built 11th–19th century around the shrine of Kusam ibn Abbas. The 1372 Shodi Mulk Oko mausoleum carries the finest carved majolica anywhere in Central Asia.
A five-domed shrine over an 18-metre sarcophagus holding relics Timur is said to have carried from Susa. Venerated by Muslims, Jews and Christians alike; the spring below the terrace has drawn pilgrims since the Sogdian period.
Set in the 1880s mansion of Jewish merchant Abram Kalontarov, carved ganch ceilings intact. Collections run from Sogdian coinage through the 1868 Russian annexation to Turkestan-era photography and Soviet cotton policy.
Red-brick, five green cupolas, built 1911–12 for the Russian garrison of Turkestan. Shut under Stalin and used as storage and a museum depot until it was returned to the church in 1996 and reconsecrated.
A one-room archive founded in 1986 by Anatoly Ionesov, holding letters, badges and gifts sent from over 100 countries during the late Soviet peace movement — an unusually candid record of the perestroika years in provincial Uzbekistan.
The first president was buried here in September 2016 beside a mosque rebuilt in 1854 on an 8th-century foundation destroyed by the Arab conquest. The marble tomb pavilion was completed in 2018 on the terrace above.
Samarkand's Bukharan Jewish quarter, its lanes of blind-walled courtyard houses still intact. The Gumbaz synagogue, built in 1891 by merchant Kalantarov, serves a community that has fallen from 30,000 to a few hundred since 1990.
A working shrine around the 9th-century jurist Abd al-Mazeddin's grave, with a 12th-century Karakhanid tomb, a Timurid portal and a 19th-century courtyard pond shaded by plane trees. Local families still picnic here on Fridays.
Samarkand paper was traded across the Islamic world from the 8th century after Chinese papermakers were captured at the Talas river in 751. The Mukhtarov brothers revived the craft in 1995 using mulberry bark and a water-driven hammer.
The oldest surviving Timurid building in the city, raised around 1380 over the grave of mystic Burhan al-Din Sagharji, whose family carried hair of the Prophet from Mecca. Deliberately plain — Timur ordered no inscriptions on it.