Samarkand Last Day

Samarkand last dayMonday October 19, 2009 Our last full day of touring and it has been excellent, with the yurt camp exception. Definitely need to return with my husband so he can see all this stuff and also so we can see some of the places that we had to miss on this trip. I do know that coming in summer is NOT an option as the place is sweltering then. October seemed to be a good month. We started our day with a stop at Gur Emir Mausoleum which Tamerlane built for his beloved grandson Mohammad Sultan. It was absolutely beautiful. Just when you think you have seen beauty in a building, you go and find a better one. At least the guides know in which order to show these things off to the best advantage. Tamerlane was also here. One guidebook called this mausoleum surprisingly modest but I think that he must have seen it before it was totally restored because there isn't much modest about it. I was busy taking photos and not paying attention to the stories like I should so I had to look it up in the Lonely Planet guide. The men are actually buried in a crypt under the mausoleum as is usually the case. There are markers in the mausoleum though and per the Lonely Planet, Timor’s market was a large block of dark green jade which was carried off in 1740 to Persia and was accidentally broken. Per the Lonely Planet, an inscription on Timor’s grave said "whoever opens this will be defeated by an enemy more fearsome than I" but per our guide, Marat, the inscription read more like, “if you disturb by rest, you will feel my power” or to that effect. Anyway, the jade stone was returned from Persia. We were lucky to be the first tourists in today and had some time to get some photos before it got overly crowded. Don’t you just hate pushy photographing tourists? Oh wait, I probably am one. On to the piece d’resistance, the Registran Square, in which there are not one but TWO beautiful Madrassahs and a gorgeous mosque, all three which have been extensively restored. AND as you might have guessed, are being used these days mainly as shops. Guess it’s not so strange to turn them into shops as the Registran Square was a large trading place in its heyday. I think that you will have to go to my flickr sight to see the photos of this place as it’s going to be hard to describe it all but I haven’t been able to upload any yet so wait awhile then you can see it all. But here’s a shot at some explanation of the glories that are there.There are minarets on the corners of the Ulug Bek Madrassah that all seem to lean and they do a bit so that if there is an earthquake, they will not fall on the Madrassah but will fall away. However it seemed to me that they leaned in and would definitely fall on the school but I am not an engineer. One of the minarets is available to climb, for a bribe to the policeman. Marat had told us about it earlier and I had forgotten. He said you can ask a policeman to climb it and pay him and he will unlock the door for you. He said not to worry when you come down because the door will be locked but the policeman will eventually remember you and come back and let you out, usually when someone else has bribed him to go up. Back to the minarets, when they were restoring the complex, one of the minarets, I think the one you climb, were at such an angle that they attached ropes to it and tried to pull it upright again. Now it is more upright but the minaret at the back right corner is what Marat calls the “Leaning Tower of Registran Square” or the “Uzbekistan Leaning Tower of Pisa”. We went into this Madrassah after standing and looking through the grill and also taking photos of the Madrassah across the square and the mosque between them. Marat was giving us too much information for me to retain it plus I was really one of the bad ones who were more interested in getting photos than paying attention and for that I am not a bit sorry because what information I did hear was quite good and I enjoyed but I seem to have quite a small attention span these days and want good photos but my camera and my skill leave a lot to be desired. I make up in volume and then get some good ones out of every trip. Into the courtyard and across to the other side where there is a large niche and a large statue of Ulug Bek seated with several men around him. These were his scholars and bright students who came to study here. They were looking at a globe but the globe is gone. I asked what happened to it but he didn’t hear me. Iron bars have been placed across the tops of many of the arches and this apparently helps the water evaporate from inside the walls and such and also many thousands of tiny pinpricks because before that, there were problems with the tiles falling off as the walls were too moist. Several of the tiles looked like they were about ready to fall as we were watching. It didn’t seem like many of the doors which used to be student cells were open and turned into shops in this Madrassah but we were early so perhaps they just hadn’t opened yet and I never went back into this Madrassah. This was a two story Madrassah and most of the second story has been reconstructed. I was thinking several times that this was just like Poland being reconstructed after the war except these ruins were from the 15th century. But they are only about as old as I am or possibly even younger and yet they seem ancient. I think it would have been good to see them in the process of being reconstructed but I am glad that they have been finished now and look so fantastic and I have had a chance to see them. We walk over to the Tillya Karre mosque now. This is the large building in centered between the two Madrassahs that are directly across from each other. Quite often two Madrassahs were built together facing each other or a Madrassah attached to a mosque or a Madrassah facing a mosque, etc. Often they were built by competing rich people wanting to pave their way into paradise a bit better or even Ulug Bek who was a believer in the secular government and built Madrassahs in Bukhara to appease the religious leaders. The mosque was magnificent. It is still used sometimes as a mosque so we couldn’t go to the prayer niche, the one that shows the direction of Mecca which in Uzbekistan is often westerly. There were three carpets on the floor in front of the niche and a rope to keep us from going into it. Also the minbar which I had been forgetting. It is the set of steps that the imam climbs to sit on the second from top step to deliver his message. The mosque had an optical illusion ceiling which was just fantastic. It looked like it was going up into a dome but Marat said that the ceiling was actually perfectly flat. It took me awhile to get centered and take a photo and I think I was always a tiny bit off center. A lot of gold in this mosque and stalactites decorated with gold and much blue and just a fascinating mosque, beautiful. There were shops to the left of the mosque and they were already open but I never got over to them. To the right was a small museum that had many photos on the wall form the 30s and 40s he said that showed the ruins of the mosques and Madrassahs as they were when the soviets started reconstruction. I took a lot of photos of the photos but as that usually doesn’t turn out too well, I managed later to buy the CD video that showed photos of each building as it was before the reconstruction started and how it looks today. Back out of the mosque and into the Sherdor Madrassah which is the least reconstructed one of them all. It has many blank walls still where they have not retiled it or painted it. It also had the most doors open on the student cells where the shops are now open. Marat explained that you had to take a test to get into the Madrassah. Once in, you were certainly expected to maintain your grades but you stayed and lived there except maybe you went home on Thursday and Friday. Parents did not have to pay anything for you to go there and you were fed and clothed. In the summer, you would get up around 4 for prayers and work and study all day until the last evening prayer. In winter it would be a bit later, like around 6 a.m. as it was colder and the sun didn’t come up as soon. You studied everything which included religion, astronomy, geography, mathematics, reading, writing, poetry, musical instruments and possibly he mentioned singing too but maybe not. This was the end of our tour of Samarkand but we still have the afternoon. My carpet buyer and I went on a spending spree. Uzbekistan uses Zum as their currency but you can’t change it back to dollars and you can’t use it anywhere else, even in their own airport duty free so everyone was trying to use up what Zum they had left. I was lucky and found a camera battery for my camera as I have been using them up rather rapidly. We looked at pottery and the bookstands, little weebles musicians and mullahs, and then wandered around taking photos of things we had missed or waiting for a different light. It is going to be sad to leave.