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| After centuries of earthquakes, pillage, neglect and more recently,
Stalinism, Samarkand and Bukhara are now threatened more by bad
planning, sanitation and over-restoration. by Michael Webb Travelers have long dreamed of visiting Samarkand and Bukhara, the legendary cities of Central Asia devastated and gloriously rebuilt in the fourteenth century by Tamerlane, the bloodthirsty Mongol conqueror. In the centuries following, a few adventurers returned with tales of splendor, but the savagery of brigands and local rulers deterred outsiders. That began to change in the nineteenth century, when the Russians seized control of the area. Their Soviet successors opened the region to guided tours, and since the fall of the Soviet Union the independent state of Uzbekistan has removed most travel restrictions. Last fall I flew there from Istanbul with high expectations, only to discover how vulnerable the legacy has become. From a balcony of the Afrosyob Hotel at the center of Samarkand, one can glimpse several monuments shimmering in the milky haze. To the south is Gur Emir, the mausoleum of Tamerlane, with its fluted blue dome, thrusting minarets, and jade-covered tombs. A half-mile east is the Registan, a paved expanse framed by three great madrassahs (Koranic schools) with brilliantly tiled porticoes. Lord Curzon--who would later serve as British Viceroy of India--came in 1889 and declared this to be the noblest public place he had seen, as magnificent as a Western city square would be if it were surrounded by Gothic cathedrals. Most subsequent visitors have been dazzled by this spectacle. Beyond the Registan is the bulbous turquoise dome of the gargantuan Bibi Khanum mosque, which Tamerlane rushed to completion as the crowning achievement of his reign. It is a stirring prospect, despite the backdrop of lumpish concrete office and apartment blocks. But it's also a sham: All these buildings have been restored and reconstructed in the past 20 years. Curzon must have been relying on his imagination, for late-nineteenth-century photographs of the Registan show rotting stumps of mud brick, broken domes, and bare arches rising from a clutter of market sheds. In fact, it is astonishing that any of these monuments have survived so many years of earthquakes, pillage, neglect, and Stalin's fierce intolerance of religion and nationalism. Under communism, many historic buildings were demolished, and what remained was marred by heavy-handed restorations that compromised the integrity of both structure and surface decoration. Steel and concrete were substituted for mud bricks, and the subtle hues of natural dyes were replaced by the garish colors of machine-made tiles. "Samarkand is being turned into a theme park, a too-perfect copy of a lost world that might fit in Las Vegas but seems painfully out of place here," wrote New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzler in a recent report. As Firdays Naberayev, a local historian, explained to him, "Our scholars tried to stop what has happened, but there was nothing they could do. When some government official comes and says that the ruins are not cute enough, that they don't please his eye and must be rebuilt, there is no way for ordinary people to protest." The problem is more than cosmetic, for a rising water table and its salts are eating into the fabric of these buildings. As water freezes and expands, the new tiles exfoliate, requiring another overlay that cannot endure. This seepage is the product of excessive irrigation, ruthlessly imposed in the 1930s to satisfy Stalin's demand that Uzbekistan supply all of the Soviet Union's cotton. Sixty years later, a country that is rich in minerals has become dependent on this one crop. "Everybody is picking cotton," proclaim billboards--though the exhortation no longer compels assent. Production is down, and the rivers are drying up. The Aral Sea (once the world's fourth largest lake) has lost three-fourths of its water in the last 30 years, turning into a toxic stew. Wind-borne chemical waste from the exposed lake bed is poisoning the surrounding land. Under Soviet rule, Samarkand's monuments were thronged with Russian visitors. Since independence, though, traffic has slowed to a trickle. Five years ago, the authorities unveiled plans to increase the number of tourists from 60,000 to 800,000 a year by 2000, and to build 20 big hotels to accommodate them. Neither goal is realistic. The one new hotel in Samarkand and its twin in Bukhara are poorly managed and overpriced. Last October--a preferred month to visit this desert country--the hotels were almost empty, and there were few visitors to the major sites. Nor was there evidence of new construction or infrastructure improvements. Thus, the restorers' excuse--that tourists, like bureaucrats, prefer pretty, colorful illusions in place of crumbling ruins--is no longer justified. Russian and Western tourists can choose from any number of more accessible and comfortable countries and theme parks; only a few adventurous travelers and architectural connoisseurs are willing to endure the struggle for visas and brave ramshackle transportation to visit these relics. The counterpart of over-restoration is sanitization: the replacement with parks and boulevards of traditional housing that provided a context and scaling device for the monuments. It is a formula for urban renewal that despots have always loved, and it was applied ruthlessly in Haussmann's Paris, Mussolini's Rome, and the New York of Robert Moses. Much of New Haven's and other American cities' centers were leveled in the 1960s in the name of urban renewal, replacing slums with greenery and speeding people on their way to the suburbs. For the Soviets, intent on remaking man and society, there was a mandate to destroy most vestiges of the feudal past. The Afrosyob, a hulking caravansary designed to awe Russian tour groups and foreign delegations, is linked to Gur Emir, which has become a national shrine, by an avenue that is only a few hundred yards long but broad enough to accommodate a May Day parade. Planned before 1991, it was carried to completion by planners who were schooled by the Soviets and have yet to learn from their mistakes. Predictably, the result is to diminish Gur Emir and a neighboring tomb, just as the approach to St. Peter's Basilica in Rome was fatally compromised by the opening up of medieval streets to create a ceremonial way. Once tightly framed by the dense fabric of courtyard houses and narrow lanes, the soaring mausoleum now floats in an expanse of the same pink marble that veneers the parapets of the Registan (one wonders who got the contract) and an unshaded, unfrequented park. Fountains play, but most of the locals understandably prefer their own arbored courtyards and teahouses. Given a choice, most Uzbekis would rather remain in the houses they have shared with their extended families for generations. Instead, the Uzbek authorities have created a kind of Potemkin village around Gur Emir, clearing a swath of houses and concealing those that remain behind a wall of patterned concrete. There have been a few small-scale efforts to upgrade existing housing and community meeting halls (which double as mosques), and people have been allowed to buy their homes. But, with residents lacking sufficient money or credit, their vibrant, tight-knit neighborhoods will continue to erode. President Islam Karimov, who was elected to a second term in 1995 with 99.6 percent of the vote, was born in Samarkand and may feel a sense of identification with the imperial ambitions of Tamerlane, who never hesitated to sweep away anything he found unworthy. Bukhara, 200 miles west of Samarkand, has been spared some of this official vandalism. When the Russians incorporated Samarkand into their empire in 1868, they left Bukhara to its emir. As a result, the development of these two cities has been strikingly different. While the monuments and old housing of Samarkand form isolated pockets in a bleak metropolis, in Bukhara they are clustered tightly together in a dusty labyrinth that has lost all but a fragment of its city walls but remains clearly separate from the Soviet sprawl all around. The houses of old Bukhara are mostly adobe and remarkably similar in character to those of New Mexico pueblos. Wheeled vehicles are few, children play in unpaved lanes, and their elders gather to chat under vine-covered pergolas or on benches beneath trees. And there are new signs of life everywhere. The madrassahs have begun to reopen, and there is even a Jewish quarter with a tiny synagogue. Craftsmen are beginning to work in vacant shops, and the outdoor restaurants around the pool of the Liab-i-Hausz are packed. Brown mud walls enfold the ochre brick mosques, madrassahs, and vaulted markets, which are densely layered. Tile is used here more sparingly than in Samarkand, and the brick domes, buttresses, and surface relief are richly mottled by the desert sun. The finest of these brick landmarks is the 1,100-year-old Samanid mausoleum, a domed cube that was buried to protect it from invading Mongols in the thirteenth century and was rediscovered by chance in 1934. The dome had to be rebuilt, but the walls were still pristine--until its sunken site flooded and the salt began to seep up. The quality of the restoration work in Bukhara and the context in which it is viewed are immeasurably superior to that of Samarkand. The late Khairallah Salamov Aminoglu, who supervised restoration efforts, came from a long line of craftsmen, and established his own firm to make traditional bricks and tiles using natural pigments. Nasim Shapirov, who was chief architect of the province for almost 30 years before setting up in private practice, sounds a hopeful note."The city is like a human body--every part of it is important," he says. "It's essential to improve communications and services, and we've begun installing new sewage and plumbing without changing the district's outward appearance. And we're constructing a model mixed-use development at the center of the city." In 1995, the city was honored with an award from the Aga Khan Trust for reincorporating "the old city as a vibrant, living social and economic part of contemporary Bukhara, while remaining faithful to the scale and texture of the old." Last October, Bukhara and Khiva, a largely reconstructed city to the north, celebrated their 2,500th anniversary. To impress foreign guests, money was freely spent to repave wide boulevards and rebuild the massive brick walls of the Ark, a symbolically important fortress that was devastated by the Bolsheviks when they seized the city in 1920. Lights and loudspeakers were imported from Germany for a pageant that was staged before the Kalon minaret--the infamous Tower of Death from which prisoners were hurled to please the nineteenth-century emirs and cow their subjects. The colorful entertainment featured ballerinas, army conscripts in funny hats, Spanish toreadors (!), and a deep-toned narration of the kind that accompanies trailers for art movies. To prevent any negative impressions of progressive Uzbekistan, locals were told to stock up and stay home for the weekend. All countries indulge in public relations extravaganzas of this kind, however grotesque the clash between show and substance. What matters is whether Uzbekistan can reconcile the prickly pride of a newly independent nation with the urgent need to accept outside support and advice, which has been freely offered. Its much abused heritage remains unique, though vulnerable to outdated planning policies and the ecological disaster that threatens the entire country. UNESCO and private institutions stand ready to help; the loss of these landmarks and their historic context would be a tragedy of worldwide significance. |
Keywords:
Uzbekistan, Bukhara, Samarkand, tourism
