Restored or Original? An Uzbekistan Monument Audit
How much of Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva is genuine medieval fabric and how much is Soviet reconstruction. A building-by-building audit, told straight.
Nothing you photograph in Samarkand looks the way it looked in 1900. Some of it looks considerably better. The Registan you stand in front of is cleaner, straighter, more completely tiled and more structurally sound than anything a nineteenth-century traveller saw, and the gap between those two states was closed by about seventy years of Soviet and post-Soviet intervention that almost no guidebook describes.
This is the question travellers ask most often and get answered least honestly. Guides tend to deflect it, partly out of pride and partly because the real answer takes longer than the stop allows. So here it is at length: what is original, what is rebuilt, how you can tell by eye, and whether it should change how you feel about the place.
Short version, before the detail. The structures are mostly real. The surfaces mostly are not.
The state these buildings were actually in
Start here, because it is the context that makes the rest defensible rather than scandalous.
Timurid Samarkand was built fast, at enormous scale, in the last decades of the fourteenth century and the first of the fifteenth. Speed had consequences. Foundations were often inadequate for the spans attempted, and several major buildings were structurally troubled within a generation of completion. Then came five centuries of neglect, seismic activity in an active earthquake zone, and the collapse of the patronage that had paid for maintenance.
By 1900 much of it was ruin. An earthquake in 1907 did serious damage across Samarkand: at the Ulugh Beg madrasah it partly destroyed the second storey and left one minaret leaning badly enough that it was expected to fall. Photographs from the period show the Registan madrasahs stripped of much of their tile, domes gone, courtyards buried under accumulated ground level.
There is a photo exhibit inside the Tilla-Kari madrasah showing exactly this, and it is the single most useful ten minutes you can spend at the Registan. Look at the pictures first, then walk outside. The building stops being a postcard and becomes a rescue.
Three eras of intervention
The work divides into phases with quite different philosophies, and knowing which phase you are looking at explains most of what you see.
The 1920s and 1930s: salvage engineering. The earliest Soviet work was about stopping collapse, and it produced the most impressive single act of the whole century. The northeastern minaret of the Ulugh Beg madrasah was out of vertical by around 180 centimetres. In 1932 a team led by the engineer V. G. Shukhov and the architect M. F. Mauer straightened it in place — jacking and rotating the standing tower back to true without dismantling the brickwork. The southeastern minaret was straightened in 1965 using what had been learned. Ground level around the building was eventually lowered by about two metres to recover the original proportions.
This phase was conservative in the technical sense. It saved fabric rather than replacing it.
The 1950s to 1970s: reconstruction. Priorities shifted towards making buildings legible again to visitors, which meant rebuilding missing elements rather than consolidating surviving ones. Domes went back up. Portals were completed. Missing sections were reconstructed from surviving fragments, from old photographs, and where neither existed, from informed inference.
The 1960s to 1980s: re-tiling. The broad campaign that gave the Registan its present appearance ran roughly from 1967 to 1987 — consolidation, reinstated facades, and an enormous quantity of new tilework replacing what had been lost. This is the phase that produced most of what your camera sees.
After 1991: national showpiece work. Independent Uzbekistan continued restoring, with heritage as a nation-building project and, later, a tourism asset. This phase is the most criticised, and Shah-i-Zinda in 2005 is the case usually cited.
Building by building
Ulugh Beg madrasah, Registan (1417–1420)
The oldest thing in the ensemble and, structurally, among the most genuine. The mass of the building is original Timurid brickwork, rescued rather than rebuilt. The minarets are original towers that were physically moved back upright. The tilework is substantially replaced. The second storey was partly rebuilt after 1907.
Verdict: real building, largely new skin.
Sher-Dor madrasah, Registan (1619–1636)
Two centuries younger, built under the Shaybanids, and the famous tigers-with-suns on the portal are the reason most people photograph it. Structure substantially original; mosaic extensively restored, with the tympanum figures reconstructed from surviving fragments.
Tilla-Kari madrasah, Registan (1646–1660)
The one with the documented liberty. Soviet restorers added a blue outer dome over the mosque that was not there in the building’s surviving state, and the consensus among specialists is that it is an invention rather than a reconstruction — a decision made for the sake of the skyline. Stand in the square and look at the three buildings together: that dome is doing composition work.
The gilded interior of the mosque, which is what the name refers to, is heavily restored but follows the original scheme.
Bibi-Khanym Mosque
The most reconstructed major monument in Samarkand, and the most honest about it if you look closely.
Built at the very end of the fourteenth century at a scale that its own engineering could not sustain, it began failing almost immediately and spent most of its life as a spectacular ruin. What stands today is largely a late-Soviet and post-Soviet rebuilding of a collapsed structure. Walk round to the less-visited sides and you can see where reconstruction stops: new brick meets old, the colour and the coursing change, and nobody has hidden the join.
Verdict: mostly new, on an original footprint, following a documented design. Our Bibi-Khanym guide covers what survives where.
Shah-i-Zinda
The controversial one, and worth being precise about.
The necropolis came through the centuries in unusually good condition — it was a continuously venerated pilgrimage site, so it was maintained rather than abandoned, and it holds fourteenth-century tilework of the highest quality anywhere in Central Asia. Then came a major restoration in 2005.
The criticism is not that the work was done badly. It is that much of it was not necessary, and that a great deal of original mosaic, majolica and terracotta was replaced when it could have been conserved. What you see now is spectacular and a significant proportion of the visible surface is twenty years old rather than six hundred.
Where to look for the real thing: the older, less-restored tombs partway up the stair, and the detail at eye level rather than the sweeping facades. Our Shah-i-Zinda guide points at the specific chambers worth slowing down for.
Gur-e-Amir
Timur’s tomb. The ribbed dome is one of the defining silhouettes of Islamic architecture and has been restored repeatedly; the drum inscription and the dome’s tiled ribs are substantially renewed. The interior, the crypt and the cenotaph arrangement are genuine, and the building never fell into the total ruin that Bibi-Khanym did.
The Ark, Bukhara
A different kind of loss, and a much more recent one.
In 1920, during the Red Army’s operation against the emirate, Mikhail Frunze ordered the citadel bombed from the air. Accounts put the damage at something like 80% of the structure. There is a persistent secondary claim that the fleeing Emir Alim Khan had parts of it destroyed himself so the harem would not be entered; what is not in dispute is that the harem buildings were reduced to rubble that archaeologists judged beyond restoration.
So when you walk up the ramp at the Ark, understand that you are walking through a partly rebuilt shell around a large empty interior. The ramp, the gate and the surviving court buildings are real. The open ground behind them is where the rest used to be.
Po-i-Kalyan, Bukhara
Among the most genuine major ensembles in the country. The Kalyan minaret of 1127 is the real thing and has stood through everything, including the Mongols, which is why the sparing legend attaches to it. The mosque and the Mir-i-Arab madrasah are sixteenth century, heavily maintained but not reconstructed on the Samarkand scale. Bukhara generally fared better than Samarkand because more of it was never ruined.
Khiva
The best-preserved of the four cities, for the administrative reason set out in our piece on the museum-reserve system: the entire walled city was made a single protected object in 1967, so the ordinary houses between the monuments were protected too.
That said, Khiva is also the most rebuilt at the level of surfaces. Mud brick requires continuous renewal by its nature — a wall that is not re-rendered every few years dissolves — so the walls you photograph are genuinely ancient in form and continuously renewed in material. That is not fakery; it is how the building type works. The carved wooden columns in the Juma Mosque are the outstanding survival, and some of them are medieval.
Tashkent
A separate case, and the starkest in the country. Tashkent’s losses were not from neglect but from two deliberate rebuildings: the Russian colonial city laid out alongside the old town after 1865, and the reconstruction of the capital following the earthquake of April 1966, which destroyed a vast area of low-rise mud-brick housing and was answered with Soviet modernist planning at speed.
What survives of the pre-modern city is fragmentary: the Khast Imam complex, the Kukeldash madrasah, the lanes around Chorsu. Very little else. Tashkent is where you notice that the question is not always restoration versus original — sometimes the building simply is not there any more.
Why so much tile had to be replaced
One technical point that makes the scale of the re-tiling easier to understand.
Timurid decoration used two main surface techniques. Banna’i is structural: glazed and unglazed bricks laid in patterns as part of the wall itself, which makes it durable, and a good deal of it survives. Cut-tile mosaic is the opposite — individually shaped glazed pieces set into a plaster bed applied to the surface. It produces the finest colour work in the world and it is, structurally, a skin glued to a wall.
Freeze, thaw, seismic movement and five hundred unmaintained years take that skin off. The brick underneath often survives perfectly well. This is why the pattern across Uzbekistan is so consistent: genuine structure, replaced surface. It was not a choice restorers made lightly so much as the physics of the material deciding for them.
What the conservation world actually argues about
If you want the framework the specialists are using, it comes down to two documents.
The Venice Charter of 1964 set the European-derived standard: conserve rather than reconstruct, make any new work distinguishable from the old, and stop where evidence stops. Judged against it, much of the Uzbek work fails, because new tile was matched seamlessly to old rather than marked as new.
The Nara Document of 1994 complicated that deliberately, arguing that authenticity must be judged within a culture’s own traditions — and that in societies where buildings are maintained by continuous renewal, insisting on original material is imposing a foreign standard. On Nara’s terms, re-rendering a Khivan mud-brick wall every few years is not a loss of authenticity. It is the building working as intended.
Both arguments are serious. Neither settles Shah-i-Zinda, where the material replaced was neither failing nor renewable by tradition.
How to tell, by eye
Four things you can check yourself, in about thirty seconds each.
- Look at tile edges. Original medieval cut-tile mosaic has slightly irregular pieces with uneven glaze and colour drift across a panel. Modern replacement is regular, the blues are more uniform, and the whites are whiter. Get close.
- Look up at the join. On many buildings the restoration ran out of budget or evidence partway up. There is often a visible horizontal line where new tilework stops and weathered original begins, especially on side elevations nobody photographs.
- Walk round the back. Restoration effort follows the camera. The rear and side faces of most major monuments show far more original fabric, and far more honest damage, than the facade.
- Check the brick. Original Timurid brick is squarer, more variable in colour and laid with wider, softer joints. Modern brick is uniform. Once you have seen the difference at Bibi-Khanym you will see it everywhere.
Does it matter?
Our honest position, offered as opinion.
The 1920s–30s engineering work was straightforwardly heroic and saved buildings that would otherwise have fallen. Nobody sensible argues with it.
The mid-century reconstruction is defensible and was done to the standards of its day. Those standards are not current conservation standards — modern practice favours conserving what survives and making interventions legible — but judging 1960s restorers by 2026 charters is not very useful.
The 2005 Shah-i-Zinda work is harder to defend, because the material replaced was not failing. That is the case where something genuinely old was traded for something that photographs better, and it is reasonable to be annoyed about it.
And the worst outcome of all was not restoration but clearance — the removal of the ordinary town around the monuments at Shakhrisabz, which put that site on UNESCO’s Danger List in 2016 and is covered in its own piece. Compared with that, re-tiling a dome is a small sin.
None of this should stop you going or spoil the looking. A rebuilt Timurid portal still tells you what Timurid architects were trying to do, at the size they were trying to do it. What the honest version buys you is the ability to notice the difference — and the moments when you are standing in front of something that really has been there for six hundred years hit considerably harder when you know they are rare.
One thing that is definitely original everywhere
Worth ending the audit on, because it gets forgotten in the argument about surfaces.
Proportion is not restorable in the sense that tile is. The height of a portal against the width of a courtyard, the ratio of dome to drum, the way an iwan frames the sky when you stand in the middle of it — these are properties of the plan and the standing structure, and they survived even where every visible glazed surface did not. When you stop at the Registan and feel the scale of the square work on you, that sensation is not a reconstruction. Fifteenth-century architects calculated it and you are receiving it as intended.
The same is true of the things you cannot photograph at all. The acoustics under a dome. The temperature drop when you step from the courtyard into a prayer hall in August, which is a designed effect produced by mass and orientation. The way the light moves across a facade through the afternoon, which is why the tile was set at those angles.
None of that needed restoring. It is why a heavily re-tiled building can still be a genuine encounter with a medieval intelligence, and why the authenticity argument, though worth having, is not the whole of what you came for.
Where to go and see the evidence
Four places, in order of usefulness.
The photo exhibit inside Tilla-Kari at the Registan, showing the ensemble’s condition a century ago. The rear elevations of Bibi-Khanym, where the reconstruction line is plainly visible. The upper, less-restored tombs at Shah-i-Zinda. And the empty ground inside the Ark in Bukhara, which is an absence rather than an exhibit and tells you more about the twentieth century than any of the labels.
Ask your guide directly which parts are original. Good ones will tell you immediately and enjoy being asked. It is a reasonable question and it deserves a straight answer, which is more than the last hundred years of guidebooks have managed.
Sources: the Ulugh Beg madrasah’s 1907 damage, the 1932 and 1965 minaret straightening and the lowering of ground level are documented at Archnet’s record for the Madrasah-i Ulugh Beg; the 1920 bombardment of the Ark and its aftermath from Eurasianet’s account of the Bukhara uprising; restoration-authenticity concerns from UNESCO’s Samarkand listing. Where specialists disagree on how much of a given surface is original, we have said so rather than picking a figure.
Featured image: Nikolai V. Bogaevskii (Public domain) via Wikimedia Commons.