I had a smile on my face as I strode across the tarmac of Samarkand airport, for I had arrived at last in the city I had toiled for four years to recreate as a novelist.
My expectations of seeing everything I had researched about one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world – it was founded in 700BC by the greatest traders of the old Silk Road, the Sogdians – could hardly have been higher.
Samarkand was once one of the greatest cities of central Asia, the ‘Rome of the East’. I was travelling in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Marco Polo and Tamerlane. Now the second city of Uzbekistan after its capital, Tashkent, the mantle of history lies heavy on Samarkand.
I was making this trip in the height of comfort and convenience, travelling by private jet and chartered train as guest lecturer with a luxury tour company.
Of all the cities of the Silk Road, Samarkand is without doubt the most evocative. To 19th-century orientalists such as James Elroy Flecker, who wrote The Golden Road to Samarkand, it was the home of all the romance and poetry in the East.
For 2,500 years, Samarkand maintained its position as the richest and most populous metropolis on the central Asian section of the Silk Road – the series of routes on which goods, people, philosophies and culture flowed back and forth from China to the Mediterranean and all points in between.
I was attracted to Samarkand as the primary location for my novel, especially when I learned that an equally legendary and despotic ruler made it his capital city in medieval times.
Timur the Lame – better known to us in the West as Tamerlane or Tamburlaine the Great, constructed at a furious pace all the beautiful mosques, madrasas (Islamic religious schools), gardens and squares of this amazing city.
But to my astonishment and that of my fellow passengers, it is nothing like the Silk Road city we expected – no winding alleyways, romantic ruins or local markets selling silks, spices and foodstuffs of every variety.
The markets exist but are now in clean, modern, open-air retail spaces that would not be out of place in Europe.
Samarkand and Bukhara, about 250 kilometres to the west, are impressively modern and clean, with wide boulevards and obvious signs of Soviet style. The mosques, madrasas, mausoleums and temples have all been restored to perfection.
The mosques, madrasas, mausoleums and temples have all been restored to perfection
If this reconstruction had not been done, these historic buildings would have disappeared by now, given the advanced state of dilapidation most were in by the turn of the last century.
In this sense, the purists’ howls of protest against what they regard as overenthusiastic renovation is missing the point. These buildings would not be here otherwise.
Uzbekistan has shed its 70 years of Soviet rule very quickly since independence in 1991, reasserting its own identity and adopting Timur as its national hero.
Shopping in these places, there is the inevitable haggling and determination by the merchants not to let you go. We took this in the spirit of the Silk Road as the tradition of buying, selling, bartering, exchanging and haggling is hardwired into the history of these great cities of ancient times.
The main plaza in Samarkand is Registan Square and it is big – about the size of two football fields, with imposing madrasa entry arches flanking three sides. It has all been restored from the dilapidated ruins of a century ago.
While the quality of the restoration work is variable, as a rule, the Soviet-era renovation is meticulously well done. For example, Timur’s mausoleum has been lovingly returned to its former grandeur in all its intricate detail.
The tomb itself is marked by a two-metre block of black jade, the biggest in the world then and now. Legend has it that Timur’s howls of rage – at being, finally, dead and buried – could be heard for weeks after his interment.
The tour pushed on to Bukhara, at the crossroads of the Silk Road’s east-west and north-south trade routes. By 500BC it was already an important centre.
Defended by 13 kilometres of ramparts and gates as part of a formidable citadel, much of it has been restored as part of its 2,500th anniversary celebration in 1997. It was the last city to fall to the Bolsheviks when the Emir of Bukhara, the last of his line, fled to Afghanistan in 1920.
There are now more than 140 restored and protected buildings in Bukhara, including a reconstruction – to 30 per cent of its former size – of the Ark, a fortified palace dating to the fifth century.
Along with the extensive restoration in Silk Road cities such as Samarkand and Bukhara, there is evidence of creeping ‘tourist-isation’ with signs in multiple languages for Silk Road tearooms and the like.
But this does not mean they are simply museum pieces.
Traditional skills and local crafts are very much alive, as I witnessed wandering into a carpet shop to watch the weaving by a row of women crouching on the floor at their looms.
Khiva was the last of our Silk Road destinations.
What we had covered in just nine days would have taken the ancient Silk Road traveller eight to 10 weeks at a good ‘caravan pace’ of 24 kilometres per day.
Can the reconstruction genie ever be returned to its bottle to conjure up the Silk Road of Flecker’s imagination?
“And softly through the silence beat the bells / Along the golden road to Samarkand,” he wrote.
Samarkand as the home of all the romance and poetry in the East lives on.
But perhaps all the time it really was just in our imaginations.