Samarkand Audioguides

Samarkand has been continuously inhabited for at least 2,750 years, making it one of the oldest cities in Central Asia. It sat at the crossroads of every major trade route between China and the Mediterranean, the place where silk, spices, and ideas from East and West met and commingled. Alexander the Great took the city in 329 BC and is said to have declared it more beautiful than he had imagined. Timur, the conqueror who called himself the Sword of Islam, made it the capital of his empire in the 14th century and filled it with architects, artisans, and craftsmen taken as tribute from the cities he destroyed. The Registan, three interconnected madrasahs facing a central plaza, is the result: the most photographed collection of Islamic architecture in Central Asia.

The blue and white faience tiles of the Registan's three madrasahs, the Ulugh Beg (1420), the Sher-Dor (1636), and the Tilya-Kori (1660), define the image of Samarkand more completely than any other structure.

The tomb of Timur himself, the Gur-e-Amir, sits a short walk away, a turquoise-ribbed dome that became the template for the Mughal architecture of India, including the Taj Mahal. The Shah-i-Zinda necropolis, a lane of funerary chapels built between the 9th and 15th centuries, is perhaps the most emotionally affecting site in the city: a procession of domed tombs whose tiles still carry some of the most extraordinary medieval ceramic work surviving anywhere on earth.