The Registan in Samarkand: history, legends and how to see it

Registan is Persian for “place of sand”, and in the cities of Central Asia it was the usual name for the main square. Samarkand’s was a market and a meeting place long before it was a monument. Royal decrees were announced here to blasts on copper pipes, and crowds gathered for celebrations and for public executions.

The square took its shape under the Timurids. Ulugh Beg, Timur’s grandson and ruler of Samarkand from 1409, built his madrasah on the west side in 1417–1420. In 1424 a khanaka, a Sufi lodge, rose opposite, and a caravanserai closed the north side. That layout lasted about two hundred years.

Ulugh Beg was 23 when work began on his madrasah: 81 by 56 metres, with two floors of student cells around a courtyard and four minarets.

It was no ordinary religious school. Astronomy was the most important subject, taught alongside mathematics, geometry, logic, the natural sciences and theology. Ulugh Beg chose the teachers himself and interviewed every one. Among them were the astronomer Qadi Zada al-Rumi and the mathematician Jamshid al-Kashi, and the ruler lectured here in person.

Four years later Ulugh Beg built his observatory on a hill outside town. His star catalogue lists 1,018 stars: the second such catalogue in seventeen centuries, after that of Hipparchus. In the courtyard, look above the doors of the cells. One mosaic inscription quotes the Prophet’s saying that the search for knowledge is the greatest of deeds.

Look up at the arch. On each side a striped big cat with a lion’s mane chases a white deer, and from its back rises a sun with a human face. Sher-Dor means “having lions” or “having tigers”, and people still argue about which.

Images of living creatures are rare in Islamic religious architecture, which is why this gate stops people in their tracks. The motif is older than the building: the lion with the sun goes back to 12th-century Seljuk coins. Today it is one of the best-known images of Uzbekistan. It was on the back of the 200-som note of 1997, and the green 5,000-som note issued in 2021 shows the Sher-Dor madrasah itself. Check your wallet before you reach the square.

The third madrasah went up in 1646–1660 on the site of the old caravanserai, partly on its foundations. Yalangtush Bahadur commissioned it too but did not live to see it finished. With Bibi-Khanym in ruins, Tilla-Kari was built as a madrasah and the city’s Friday mosque in one, and it served as the main mosque until the 1920s.

Its name means “gilded”, and you see why the moment you step into the prayer hall on the west side of the courtyard. Walls and dome are covered in kundal, painting in low relief finished with gold leaf, on a deep blue ground.

Much of it is the work of restorers. The earthquake of 1817–1818 brought down the top of the portal. The turquoise outer dome above the mosque was built only in the 1970s, and the painted and gilded interior was completed in 1979. The building also holds an exhibition on the restoration of the Registan.

Samarkand lies in an earthquake zone, and the 19th century was hard on the square. One of the western minarets of Ulugh Beg’s madrasah fell in 1870. Photographs published in 1901 show its north and south wings as heaps of rubble.

In the autumn of 1918 the north-east minaret of Ulugh Beg’s madrasah was found to be leaning. Preparations to save it took a decade. In 1932 Vladimir Shukhov, the Moscow engineer famous for his openwork steel towers, straightened it; it was his last engineering work. The south-east minaret followed in 1965, under the engineer E. M. Gendel.

Restoration went on for more than seventy years. In the 1950s and 1960s the ground at Ulugh Beg’s madrasah was lowered by two metres. In the 1990s its lost upper floor of cells was rebuilt. In 2001 the Registan joined the UNESCO World Heritage List as part of “Samarkand – Crossroad of Cultures”.

After dark all three facades are floodlit, and on some evenings a sound-and-light show throws 3D projections across the madrasahs. It pauses at times for maintenance, so we check the schedule for our guests on the day.

The square is a stage too. From 1997 the Sharq Taronalari international music festival was held here every two years, in the open air between the madrasahs; the 2024 edition moved to the Eternal City complex on the edge of town. On 6 September 2026 the pianist Lang Lang played on the Registan with the National Symphony Orchestra of Uzbekistan. What is next: our festival calendar.

• Ticket: 100,000 som for a foreign adult, 50,000 som for ages 7 to 18, free for younger children. Buy it at tickets.registon.uz and pay online.
• Hours: from 8:00 into the evening, with longer hours in the season and shorter ones in winter.
• Light: come at opening time, when the morning sun lights Ulugh Beg’s madrasah. Sher-Dor, opposite, takes the afternoon light. Then come back after dark.
• Time: 1.5 to 2 hours, plus a short evening visit.
• Dress: shoulders and knees covered, above all in the Tilla-Kari mosque. More in our guide to what to wear in Uzbekistan.
• Photos: allowed; ask at the desk about any separate filming fee.
• Shopping: the ground-floor cells around the courtyards, once students’ rooms, now hold souvenir sellers: silk scarves, ikat, ceramics, carpets. Bargaining is normal.

Samarkand is 2 hours 30 minutes from Tashkent on the Afrosiyob express: see Tashkent to Samarkand and trains in Uzbekistan. For the rest of the city: Samarkand in 1, 2 or 3 days, Samarkand sights, tickets and hours and our Samarkand city guide. With a guide, the square is part of the Samarkand highlights tour and our other Samarkand tours.