Ulugbek and Abdulaziz Khan Madrasahs, Bukhara
Two madrasahs facing each other across a Bukhara street, built 235 years apart: restraint on one side, everything the craftsmen knew on the other.
Walk north from the trading domes and the street narrows between two portals facing each other about twenty metres apart. One is plain, geometric and modest in scale. The other is covered in tile, carving, gilding and colour to the point of excess.
They are both madrasahs, they are deliberately aligned, and they were built 235 years apart. Standing between them is the fastest architecture lesson in Bukhara.
Kosh: the paired plan
This arrangement has a name. A kosh ensemble is two buildings placed face to face across an axis, so that each portal answers the other. Bukhara has several; this is the clearest.
The point is not symmetry for its own sake. Placing a new building opposite an old one was a statement about continuity and, usually, about outdoing the predecessor. When Abdulaziz Khan built here in the 1650s, he was answering a building that had stood since the Timurid period, and the answer was not subtle.
Ulugbek's madrasah, 1417
The older one was built by Ulugh Beg, grandson of Timur, astronomer and ruler of Samarkand, and it is the oldest surviving madrasah in Central Asia. He built three: this one, one at Gijduvan and the great one on the Registan in Samarkand.
It is small by the standards of what came later: two storeys of student cells around a courtyard, a modest portal, and decoration confined to geometric brick and tile panels rather than spread across every surface. The proportions do the work.
An inscription on the entrance carries a line about the pursuit of knowledge being the duty of every Muslim, male and female, which visitors like to quote and which fits what is known of Ulugh Beg: a ruler more interested in astronomy than conquest, eventually killed on his son's orders. Our post on the Registan in Samarkand covers his larger madrasah there.
The building was repaired heavily in the 20th century and has housed museum displays on and off. What to look at: the mosaic over the portal, the carved wooden doors, and the courtyard, which is small enough to feel like a college rather than a monument.
Abdulaziz Khan's madrasah, 1652
Across the street is the opposite instinct. Abdulaziz Khan ruled Bukhara in the middle of the 17th century, and his madrasah was intended to be the most lavish building in the city.
The techniques are piled up: carved and painted tile mosaic, relief majolica, carved marble at the base, moulded and painted ganch plaster inside, gilding, and the use of a yellow that had not appeared in Bukharan decoration before. The vaults inside the entrance halls are covered in kundal work, raised gold-painted patterns that catch the light.
Look for the landscapes. Panels inside include stylised scenes with buildings and plants, and elsewhere in the decoration there are creatures: a dragon of unmistakably Chinese type and the simurgh bird. Figurative motifs of this kind are rare in this context and reflect how much Bukhara traded with, and borrowed from, the rest of Asia.
The building was never finished. The khan was deposed in 1681, work stopped, and parts of the decoration were left incomplete, which you can see if you look at the asymmetries in the portal.
What to notice when you stand between them
- Scale. The later building is taller and wider, and it was meant to be.
- Colour. Ulugbek's palette is blue, white and brick. Abdulaziz's adds yellow, green, gold and a far larger range of pattern.
- Geometry against nature. The 15th-century decoration is mostly interlaced geometry; the 17th-century work is full of flowers, vases and landscapes.
- Confidence and decline. The irony is that the plainer building comes from a period of strength, and the ornate one from a khanate already losing ground. Grandeur is not always a sign of health.
Both buildings now hold craft shops and small museum displays, which is normal in Bukhara and means you can go inside both for very little. The wood-carving museum that has occupied Abdulaziz Khan's madrasah at times is worth twenty minutes.
What a madrasah actually did
Both buildings follow the same plan because they were built for the same job, and knowing the job makes the plan readable.
A madrasah was a residential college. Students, usually young men who had finished elementary study at a maktab, lived in the small cells around the courtyard, often two to a room, and studied Quran, hadith, law, logic, grammar and arithmetic under teachers attached to the institution. A course might run for years, and a graduate could expect to become an imam, a judge, a teacher or a clerk in the administration.
The rooms on the ground floor at the front were usually lecture halls and a mosque; the upper cells were accommodation. The whole thing was funded by waqf, an endowment of shops, land or caravanserais whose income paid the teachers and fed the students. That is why a ruler building a madrasah also had to hand over property, and why these institutions survived centuries of changing politics.
It also explains the shops you see in the cells today. A madrasah has always been embedded in the commercial life of the street outside; a craft seller in a student cell is a newer version of a very old arrangement.
Visiting
The pair stands on the main pedestrian route between Lyabi-Hauz and Po-i-Kalyan, a minute from the trading domes. You will pass them without looking for them.
- Entry: a small ticket for each interior; the street view costs nothing.
- Time needed: 30 minutes for both, an hour if you look properly at the kundal work.
- Best light: mid-morning, when the sun is on the Abdulaziz portal; the street is narrow and shaded for much of the day.
- Shopping: the cells are full of craft sellers. Prices are negotiable and higher than in the domes.
Our Bukhara travel guide puts these into a walking order with the rest of the old city, and the Silk Road architecture guide explains the vocabulary, from iwan to kundal, if the terms are new. The historic centre of Bukhara has been on UNESCO's World Heritage list since 1993.
Give them ten minutes even if you skip the interiors. Stand in the middle of the street, look one way, then the other, and you have seen what happened to Central Asian architecture between the Timurids and the last khans.
Featured image: silar (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons.