How to read Uzbek architecture: madrasah, mausoleum, minaret, khanaka and iwan

Almost every historic monument you will visit is one of five types. Once you know which one you are looking at, the layout makes sense.

• Madrasah: a college, with rooms for students around a courtyard, lecture halls and a room for prayer. Ulugh Beg’s madrasah on the Registan, built in 1417–1420, measures 81 by 56 metres, with two floors of student cells and four minarets.
• Mausoleum: a tomb, usually a domed chamber over the grave. The oldest you can visit is the Samanid Mausoleum in Bukhara, from the turn of the 9th and 10th centuries; the grandest is Gur-e-Amir, Timur’s tomb in Samarkand.
• Minaret: the tower from which the call to prayer was given. The Kalyan minaret in Bukhara, of 1127, rises 46.5 metres and also served as a watchtower and a beacon.
• Khanaka: a Sufi lodge, a domed hall for gatherings and prayer with rooms for dervishes and travellers. In Bukhara, the khanaka of Nadir Divan-Begi, of 1619–1620, stands on the west side of Lyabi-Hauz.
• Mosque: from a small neighbourhood mosque to the Friday mosque where the whole city prayed. Timur meant the courtyard of Bibi-Khanym to hold 10,000 people.

Many of these buildings are still in use. The Mir-i-Arab madrasah in Bukhara has taught students again since 1946, and the Kalyan and Bolo-Hauz mosques hold Friday prayers. In other madrasahs the student cells now house craftsmen, shops and museums.

The first thing you see of any large building is its pishtaq, the Persian word for a portal that projects from the facade: a tall rectangular frame around a deep arched niche, with the real door small at the back. It is the building’s signboard, and the builders put their best tilework and inscriptions on it. Some even signed it: on the portal of Gur-e-Amir the mosaic carries the name of its builder, Muhammad ibn Mahmud of Isfahan.

Two numbers show how far the idea was pushed. The portal of the Bibi-Khanym Mosque rises 35 metres. The gate of Timur’s White Palace, Ak-Saray in Shahrisabz, had an arch 22.5 metres wide, the widest span in Central Asia, and its two broken towers still stand about 38 metres high.

Our tip: on the Registan, stand in the middle of the square and compare the pishtaqs. Sher-Dor, built two centuries after the Ulugh Beg madrasah opposite, mirrors it, but by then the ground had risen about two metres, so the copy came out squatter.

An iwan is a vaulted hall walled on three sides and open on the fourth: a room that is half outdoors. Put one in the middle of each side of a courtyard and you have the four-iwan plan, used for madrasahs and mosques across Central Asia and Iran. The deep niche behind a pishtaq is an iwan too.

In Bukhara and Khiva the same word, ayvan, also means a porch of carved wooden columns under a flat painted ceiling, which gives shade and catches the breeze. The best known is the ayvan of the Bolo-Hauz mosque in Bukhara, added in 1917: twenty columns 12 metres tall with carved stalactite capitals. In Khiva, the harem of Allakuli Khan’s Tash-Hauli palace, built in the 1830s, opens onto tall ayvans, one for each of the khan’s four wives and the largest for the khan.

The same carpentry fills a whole hall in the Juma Mosque of Khiva: a flat roof on 212 carved wooden columns, rebuilt in its present form in 1788. Our guide to Itchan Kala shows where to find them.

Walk through the pishtaq of a madrasah and you are in its courtyard, lined with small arched doors on one or two floors. Each door opens into a hujra, a cell where students lived and studied. The madrasahs of the Registan show the arrangement best, and many of their ground-floor cells now hold craftsmen and souvenir stalls, so you can step inside one.

In the room for prayer, the wall that faces Mecca carries the mihrab, a niche that shows the direction of prayer. It is often the most finely decorated spot in the building: the mosaic mihrab of the Kalyan Mosque in Bukhara, of 1514, is signed by the calligrapher Bayazid al-Puroni.

In a working mosque, the prayer hall belongs to the people who pray there. Ask your guide when it is fine to go in, and do not photograph people at prayer.

Gumbaz simply means dome: the Kok Gumbaz mosque in Shahrisabz is “the blue dome”. The early type sits on the Samanid Mausoleum: a broad, low dome on a brick cube, with four small domes at the corners.

Timur’s builders wanted their domes to be seen from far away, so they made them double. Inside is a lower vault in proportion to the room; outside, a second, much taller shell stands on a high drum, faced mostly in turquoise tiles and sometimes ribbed. At Bibi-Khanym the outer dome reaches about 40 metres, while the vault above the mihrab inside rises 30.

The dome to study is Gur-e-Amir’s: about 15 metres across and 12.5 metres high, with 64 deep ribs, swelling slightly over its drum. Around the drum runs an inscription in letters several metres tall: “Eternity belongs to God”.

Under every tile is baked brick, and for centuries the brick was the decoration too. On the Samanid Mausoleum small bricks are set in basketweave, chequerboard and rosette patterns at different depths, so the walls change with the sun. On the Kalyan minaret no two bands of brick ornament repeat a pattern.

Then came colour. These are the words you will hear at Shah-i-Zinda, where a single lane holds them all:

• Carved terracotta: a pattern cut deep into clay panels, which are then glazed and fired, so light and shadow do half the work. The facade of Shadi Mulk Aka, of 1372, is the finest example.
• Majolica: glazed tiles with a painted design. The inside of Shadi Mulk Aka is almost all majolica on a deep blue ground.
• Mosaic: tiles glazed in single colours, cut into small pieces and fitted together like a puzzle, as on the portal of Tuman Aka, of 1405.
• Banna’i: glazed and plain bricks laid side by side, so that the pattern, or whole words, are built into the wall.
• Kashin: not a technique but a material, stonepaste in English: a white ceramic body made mostly of ground quartz with a little glass frit and clay. A Persian treatise of 1301 gives ten parts quartz to one of frit and one of clay. It was invented to give a white body like Chinese porcelain, and colours on it come out bright.

The tiles were not only there for beauty: they protected the brick behind them from heat, frost, rain and dust. In Khiva the Kalta-Minor of 1852–1855 takes the idea to the end: it is the only minaret covered entirely in glazed tiles.

Girih is Persian for “knot”: geometric patterns of straight interlacing bands that form stars and polygons. One of the earliest examples in Uzbekistan is on the gateway of the Rabat-i Malik caravanserai, of 1078, on the road from Navoi to Bukhara. Under the Timurids flowing plant scrolls took over much of the surface, but girih stayed in use on Central Asian buildings long after.

Kufic is the oldest style of Arabic calligraphy, named after the city of Kufa in Iraq: angular, upright and horizontal. Its square form was made for builders, with bricks and tiles acting as pixels. Stand under the pylons of Ak-Saray and you will see whole words laid out in a grid of blue bricks, most of them from the Quran. On the Kalyan minaret a band of Kufic carries the name of the ruler who built it, Arslan Khan.

Ganch is the local carving plaster: gypsum mixed with clay or loess, cut while it is still fresh into deep, lace-like panels. In Termez the mausoleum of al-Hakim at-Termizi was covered inside with carved ganch by the end of the 11th century. In the White Hall of the emir’s summer palace, Sitorai Mohi-Hosa outside Bukhara, master Shirin Muradov laid carved ganch over mirrors and repeated no pattern twice: see our day trips around Bukhara.