Hazrat Khizr Mosque, Samarkand
The mosque on the edge of Afrasiyab: a painted wooden verandah, the best free view of Bibi-Khanym, and the tomb of Uzbekistan's first president.
On the lip of the Afrasiyab plateau, where the old city ends and the new one begins, there is a small mosque with a painted wooden porch and a view that most visitors to Samarkand never bother to walk up to.
Hazrat Khizr is worth ten minutes for the ceiling, another ten for the terrace, and a little thought for the marble building beside it, which is where Islam Karimov, the country's first president, is buried.
The oldest religious site in the city
The claim made for this spot is that it held Samarkand's first mosque, built in the 8th century after the Arab conquest, on ground that had carried a Zoroastrian temple before that. The position makes sense: this was the southern gate of Afrasiyab, the pre-Mongol city, on the road in.
Nothing of that survives above ground. The Mongols destroyed the city in 1220 and the site lay empty for centuries. What you see was rebuilt from the 1850s onwards, with the portal and minaret finished around 1919, and restored again since.
The dedication is to Khizr, a figure in Islamic tradition associated with hidden knowledge, water and the granting of help to travellers. He is not a prophet in the ordinary sense and his story sits slightly outside the standard accounts, which is part of why shrines to him attract the kind of devotion this one does.
What to look at
The building is small and its pleasures are all at close range.
The verandah. An open ayvan along the front, with carved wooden columns and a ceiling painted in orange, turquoise, green and gold. It is the best painted ceiling in Samarkand that is not behind glass, and it is entirely different in feeling from the tiled monuments down the hill.
The tilework. Bright, late and less restrained than the Timurid work elsewhere in the city, with yellow and green in the mix.
The terrace. Walk to the edge of the platform. Below you is Bibi-Khanym mosque in full, the Siab bazaar beside it, and further round, the domes of Shah-i-Zinda on the ridge. This is the free panorama of Samarkand's northern monuments, and it is better than anything you pay for.
Go in the late afternoon. The sun comes round onto Bibi-Khanym's facade and the whole view warms up.
The Karimov mausoleum
Islam Karimov led Uzbekistan from the end of the Soviet period until his death in 2016. He was born in Samarkand, and he was buried in the cemetery beside this mosque; a domed marble mausoleum was subsequently built over the grave.
It is open to visitors, there is no charge, and a steady stream of Uzbek families come to it. Honour guards stand at the entrance. The building is deliberately traditional in form and unmistakably new in execution.
How you read it is up to you. Karimov's quarter-century in power is not a settled subject: he held the country together through a difficult transition, and his government's record on political freedom and human rights drew sustained international criticism. Uzbekistan under his successor has opened up considerably while keeping his memorial prominent.
As a visitor, the practical advice is simple: it is a grave and a place of respect for the people around you, so behave accordingly, keep your voice down, dress modestly and do not photograph the guards.
Who Khizr is
The figure this mosque is named for is one of the more intriguing in Islamic tradition, and worth a paragraph because the name turns up across Central Asia.
Khizr, the green one, is usually identified with the unnamed servant of God in the Quran's account of Moses, a teacher whose actions look wrong until their purpose is revealed. Popular tradition made him immortal, a wanderer who appears to travellers in difficulty, helps, and disappears. He is associated with water, with greenness and with sudden rescue.
That association is why shrines to him sit at gates, crossings and springs, and why merchants on the Silk Road paid attention to him. A mosque at the entrance to the city, on the road that caravans used, is exactly where you would expect his name.
It also explains the devotional traffic. People come here with practical requests, about journeys, children, illness, jobs, and the atmosphere in the prayer hall is closer to a shrine than to a congregational mosque. If you visit on a Friday you will see it at its busiest.
Visiting
- Where: on the southern edge of the Afrasiyab plateau, across the road from Bibi-Khanym and the Siab bazaar.
- Entry: free, for both the mosque and the mausoleum.
- Time needed: 20 to 30 minutes for both, more if you sit on the terrace.
- Dress: shoulders and knees covered; a scarf for women inside the prayer hall.
- Prayer times: it is a working mosque, busiest on Fridays. Wait outside if prayers are under way.
- Best light: late afternoon for the view, morning for the painted ceiling.
The natural route is to come out of Shah-i-Zinda, walk down through the Afrasiyab edge, stop here, then cross to the bazaar for lunch and Bibi-Khanym afterwards. Our Samarkand travel guide sets out the full day, and Samarkand as a whole has been on UNESCO's World Heritage list since 2001.
Why it is worth the detour
Samarkand's great monuments are museums. They are magnificent, they are also managed, ticketed and full of people photographing them.
Hazrat Khizr is a small working mosque on a hill where local people come to pray, to visit a grave and to sit in the shade looking at their own city. It costs nothing, takes twenty minutes, and gives you the best view in Samarkand along with a completely different register from the Registan.
Put it between two of the big sights rather than making a trip of it, and it will be one of the parts of the day you remember.
Featured image: Arina Pan (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons.