The Golden Road to Samarkand

Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells
When shadows pass gigantic on the sand,
And softly through the silence beat the bells
Along the Golden Road to Samarkand.

We travel not for trafficking alone:
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:
For lust of knowing what should not be known
We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.

This morning, two days behind schedule, we set out for Samarkand, along a road significantly less Golden than that of James Elroy Fecker. The road from Tashkent south to Samarkand is, these days, a good one, but the country it traces is drab: vast cotton fields as far as the eye can see, only partially obscured by service stations and small market buildings.

Samarkand was once one of the greatest cities of the world. It's place in the western mind was one by Tamerlane, or Temur the lame, that mighty 13th century warlord, who conquered much of Asia and made Samarkand is capital. At a time when the West was poor, diseased, and squabbling, the vast riches of the east were concentrated under the aegis of one man, and systematically brought back to one city: Samarkand.

The city had been prominent before Temur's time -- indeed it's ancient name "Semiz-Kent" means "Rich City" in the ancient local Turkish dialect. It was a major silk road trading city, notable for preserving itself during the terrors of Genghis Khan by promptly surrendering at the warlord's approach. Its neighbors who held out were razed to the ground (it was at Khojand that Genghis said "I am God's punishment for your sins"), but Samarkand was treated fairly. Indeed it is said that it was in Samarkand's main mosque that Genghis was said to have made his only entrance into a standing structure.

A scant century after Genghis's coming, in 1366, Temur made it the first city he conquered on his meteoric rise to power, and it remained his lifelong home (despite only once spending more than a year there). He was obsessed with his collection of plunder from far away lands, and Samarkand was the prime beneficiary of this. He brought back scholars and builders, poets and craftsmen from every part of Asia, and put them to work beautifying his city, making it into the greatest city in the world. The population swelled, and he built outer suburbs for his subjects to live in, naming these lesser villages after the once-great cities he had conquered: Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Delhi, etc.

It was through these suburbs that we drove into Temur's ancient capital. The monuments of Temur and his successors no longer dominate the skyline, for since the red flag was hoisted over the Blue Palace in 1924, Samarkand has been primarily a minor soviet city, and as such was subjected to the same 15-story hotels and drab office buildings that could have been found anywhere in the empire. The soviets, however, didn't raze any of the buildings they found, rather just built around them. Indeed, if anything, they, were a little to zealous in "preserving" the ancient structures. The present regime, which has rehabilitated Temur as a nationalist symbol, has continued this trend, and today, the Timurid domes are a dazzling blue, the brick walls a smooth earth-colored surface, and the fountains sprout water to miraculous heights.

But the city is still Samarkand, and the ghosts of past splendors are not all extinguished by modern excesses. Tomorrow we set out with a guide to explore the buildings themselves.