Bolo Hauz Mosque: Bukhara's Pillared Courtyard
Twenty painted columns, a pool that doubles them, and the emir's Friday mosque facing the Ark across the old Registan square in Bukhara.
Bukhara's best piece of architecture is not tiled and not domed. It is a roof on twenty wooden poles, and it is the only thing left of the square where the emirs of Bukhara held court.
Bolo Hauz sits directly opposite the Ark citadel, across what used to be the Registan, the open ground where proclamations were read and executions carried out. The emir walked across that space to pray here on Fridays.
The forty pillars
What everyone photographs is the summer iwan: a deep open porch, around 12 metres high, with a painted coffered ceiling carried on twenty slender elm columns, each topped with a stalactite capital in carved and painted wood.
Locals call it the mosque of forty columns. There are twenty; the other twenty are in the pool in front, which is what the hauz in the name refers to. When the water is still and full, the reflection completes the count, and that is the shot to wait for.
Look up rather than along. The ceiling is the real work: painted panels in red, green, blue and gold, with patterns that have more in common with Khorezmian woodwork than with the tile traditions of Samarkand. Each capital is carved differently.
Dates, in the right order
The complex came together in stages, which is why sources give different years.
- 1712 onwards: the winter mosque, the enclosed hall at the back, together with the pool. Construction of this phase is usually dated to around 1712 to 1717.
- Early 20th century: the famous columned iwan was added in front, giving the mosque its summer prayer space and its present face.
- 1917: the small minaret beside it, built by the master craftsman Shirin Muradov, who also worked on the emir's summer palace.
So the building you admire is, in its most photogenic part, roughly a century old rather than three. That is not a criticism. It is the last great flowering of Bukharan woodcraft, made at the point when the emirate was about to end.
Praying opposite the fortress
The siting matters. The Ark, the fortified residence of the rulers, is a windowless mud-brick mass across the open ground. Bolo Hauz was the emir's Friday mosque, and its lightness faces that bulk directly.
Whether that contrast was intended as a statement is not something the sources settle. What is clear is that the emir's walk from the gate of the Ark to the mosque was a public occasion, watched by the city, and that the square between them was where power was performed.
Everything else on that square is gone, cleared in the Soviet period. Bolo Hauz is the only surviving building of the old Registan, which makes the empty park in front of it a kind of evidence.
How the iwan works
The columned porch is not decoration bolted onto a mosque. It is a piece of climate engineering, and once you see that, the design makes sense.
Bukhara summers run well past 40 degrees. A closed prayer hall in that heat is unusable by mid-morning, so the summer mosque is open on three sides, deep enough that direct sun never reaches the back wall, and set behind a body of water that cools the air moving across it. The columns are slender because they only carry a light timber roof, and slender columns let the breeze through.
The winter mosque behind does the opposite job: thick walls, small openings, a dome that traps warm air above the congregation. Two buildings, one for each half of the year, which is a pattern you will see across Central Asian religious architecture once you start looking for it.
The elm trunks themselves deserve a look at eye level. They stand on stone bases that keep the wood out of ground moisture, and several have visible repairs where sections have been spliced in over the decades. Timber of this length was expensive in a treeless region, and reusing and mending it was normal practice.
Visiting
This is a working mosque with daily prayers, and it fills on Fridays. Visitors are welcome outside prayer times.
- Entry: free. There is no ticket, and nothing to pay unless you want to leave a donation.
- Dress: shoulders and knees covered; women should have a scarf for the interior.
- Shoes: off before you step onto the iwan platform.
- Best light: late afternoon, when the sun comes round onto the ceiling and the reflection sits in the pool.
- Time needed: 15 to 20 minutes, longer if you sit on the edge of the pool, which most people end up doing.
- Fridays: come before 11am or after 2pm, and stay outside if prayers are under way.
The mosque is a ten-minute walk west of Lyabi-Hauz and directly opposite the Ark, so the natural plan is to do both in the same morning. Our Bukhara travel guide sets the order for the rest of the city.
Why it stands out
After three days in Bukhara you will have seen a great deal of blue tile, and it starts to blur. Bolo Hauz works on different materials: wood, paint, water and shade.
It is also one of the very few monuments in the old city that is free, in use, and unhurried. Nobody is selling you anything on the steps. You can sit by the pool for half an hour, watch men arrive for afternoon prayers, and get a clearer sense of contemporary Bukhara than any museum will give you.
If you want one more layer, walk round to the water tower behind the Ark, a steel lattice structure from the 1920s that now has a viewing platform. From up there you can see the mosque, the citadel and the shape of the old square in one view. The historic centre of Bukhara has been on UNESCO's World Heritage list since 1993, and this corner is where its recent history is easiest to read.
Featured image: upyernoz (CC BY 2.0) via Wikimedia Commons.