Kagan: The Emir of Bukhara's Russian Palace

Twelve kilometres from Bukhara's tiled domes there is a palace that looks like it belongs in Crimea: columns, balustrades, European windows, a pale facade with baroque flourishes. It was built by the emir of Bukhara for a guest who never arrived.

Kagan is a railway town, and the palace exists because of the railway. The two stories are the same story.

The railway deal

In the 1880s the Russian empire was building the Trans-Caspian railway across Central Asia, and the line needed to cross the emirate of Bukhara, which by then was a Russian protectorate with a good deal of internal autonomy.

The emir agreed, on a condition that tells you everything about how he saw the arrangement: the line was not to come close to Bukhara itself. Holy Bukhara, with its hundreds of madrasahs, was not to have a Russian station in it.

So the station was built out in the fields, and a new settlement grew around it, called New Bukhara and later Kagan. It filled with Russian officials, railway workers, banks, a telegraph office and the offices of trading firms: a European town at arm's length from the Uzbek one.

A palace for a tsar

When word came that Tsar Nicholas II might visit, Emir Abdulahad Khan commissioned a residence suitable for him, next to the station so that the imperial train could draw up outside. Work began in the mid-1890s and the building was finished a few years later.

The design was by a Russian architect and the style is a deliberate mixture: European classical proportions with Moorish and oriental detailing, domes, arcades, ornamental plasterwork. Local craftsmen worked alongside Russian builders, and the result satisfies nobody's purism and is genuinely interesting to look at.

The tsar never came. The palace served instead as a guest house for Russian officials and dignitaries who could not be accommodated in Bukhara itself, and later as a railway workers' club, a cultural centre and offices.

What you see today

The exterior is the reason to come: the facade, the entrance, the ornamental detail and the general oddity of the thing standing in a provincial railway town.

Inside, the condition is variable and access is not guaranteed. The building has been used, adapted and partly restored over more than a century, and at different times it has been open, closed, under scaffolding or occupied by an institution. Some visitors get a full look at the halls; others photograph the outside and leave.

Ask in Bukhara before committing to the trip, and treat the interior as a bonus rather than the plan.

The other thing to look at is the town itself: the station, the railway housing, a few Russian-era public buildings and a church. Kagan is a small, unpolished working town, and that is part of its interest.

The two Bukharas

The pattern that produced Kagan repeated itself across Russian Central Asia, and once you know it you see it everywhere.

Rather than rebuilding the existing cities, the colonial administration laid out new quarters beside them: straight avenues, trees, churches, barracks, a station and a bank, separated from the old town by a canal, a park or simply open ground. Tashkent has one, Samarkand has one, and Fergana is an entire city built this way.

Bukhara's version was unusual because the emirate was nominally independent, so the Russian town could not simply be attached to the old city. It was put twelve kilometres away, which is why Kagan exists as a separate place rather than as a district.

Walk the streets around the station for ten minutes and the intention is legible: single-storey houses with iron roofs and shuttered windows, a grid of streets, the remains of a park. It is a Russian provincial town dropped into the Bukharan desert, and it has been quietly falling apart and being patched up for a century.

Getting there

• By taxi: 20 to 25 minutes from central Bukhara. Cheap; agree a return fare with waiting time.
• By train: Kagan is Bukhara's main railway station, so if you arrive or leave by rail you are already here. Many travellers pass through without realising the palace is a few minutes away.
• Time needed: 30 to 45 minutes, plus travel.
• Combine with: the Sitorai Mokhi-Khosa summer palace on the other side of the city, which is the same story told in a different register, or with Chor-Bakr.

If you are catching a night train, the palace is a sensible way to spend the hour before you need to be at the station.

Why it is worth knowing about

Uzbekistan's tourist story runs from the Silk Road to independence with a gap in the middle. Kagan fills part of that gap.

Between 1868 and 1920 Bukhara was a protectorate: the emir kept his throne, his court and his religious authority, while Russia controlled foreign policy, the railways and the money. The palace is that arrangement in architecture, an emir building a European house for a tsar, at a distance from the city he was not willing to let the tsar into.

The arrangement ended in 1920, when Soviet forces took Bukhara and the last emir fled to Afghanistan. Our post on the Ark citadel covers the other end of that story, and the summer palace shows the same emirs decorating in the same hybrid taste on their own terms.

Straight verdict: this is a stop for people interested in the colonial and railway period, not a must-see. If you have three days in Bukhara and have already done the old town, it is an unusual and cheap hour. If you have two, skip it.

Featured image: BeshevI (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons.