The blue arrives before anything else. I crossed a plain country of cotton and low desert, khaki to the edge of sight, before the first dome lifted over the rooftops in a colour that has no business in all that dust, a deep cobalt banded with turquoise. It is the first sign of what these cities were, and where their money went. Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva sit along a trade road that died when the sea routes opened, and the wonder of them is how much of the tile is still standing.
Samarkand keeps its grandest room outdoors. The Registan is three tiled schools facing each other across a single square, each a cliff of glazed brick and cut mosaic, and the oldest was raised by Ulugh Beg, a grandson of the conqueror Timur who ruled here in the fifteenth century and measured the length of the year to within a minute from an observatory on the edge of town. At midday the square lies flat and hot and thick with tour groups. Come back at dusk, when the facades warm and the swifts come out, and it becomes the finest thing I saw in the country. On the school across the square two great cats, half lion and half tiger, run down white deer beneath a rising sun with a human face, painted onto the front of a house of religion in a faith that frowns on painting living things at all.
For the tile itself, close enough to lay a hand on, the place is Shah-i-Zinda, a lane of tombs that climbs a low hill on the edge of the city. It is a working shrine, grown over centuries around the grave of a cousin of the Prophet, and it reads like a catalogue of everything a tiler can do: glazed brick, carved terracotta, hand-painted majolica, and mosaic cut from single tiles and set piece by piece. I went early, before the coaches, and had the corridor to myself for twenty minutes, both walls close and blue and cold under the fingers.
Bukhara is the opposite of a set-piece. Where Samarkand hands you monuments one at a time, Bukhara is a whole medieval town left more or less intact, and the pleasure is in wandering it with no particular aim. At its heart stands the Kalyan minaret, a brick tower finished in 1127, and the story every guide tells is that Genghis Khan, who levelled most of the city a century later, looked up at it and ordered it spared. Around it the covered bazaars still run, four domed halls that once sorted the trade by kind, the jewellers under one roof and the money-changers under another. They sell carpets and knives and the blue-and-white pottery of the Fergana valley now, but the light still falls through the same holes in the same domes.
The other thing worth crossing the country for is lunch. Plov is rice cooked down with mutton, onion and yellow carrot in a wide iron pot, and every region insists its own is the true one. In Samarkand they lay it out in careful layers and slice cured horse sausage over the top; in Bukhara they sweeten it with raisins. It is a midday dish, made in the morning and gone by mid-afternoon, eaten off shared platters at long tables, often under a mulberry tree by a pool of still water. Take green tea with it, poured a little at a time into a bowl with no handle, and do not be in a hurry to get up.
Nothing here was left plain. They spent everything on the surface, and the surface is what has lasted.
Khiva sits far out west, across a long day of desert, and it is the strangest of the three. It is a small walled city so complete that it can feel staged, until you leave the main lane and find schoolchildren and wood-carvers and washing strung between the mud-brick houses. Its emblem is the Kalta Minor, a fat turquoise minaret meant to be the tallest in the Muslim world that stops short a third of the way up, because the khan who ordered it was killed before it was done. Climb the old watchtower on the western wall for the last hour of light, when the towers go amber and then a soft pink, and the whole small city lies below you at once.
Inside the walls the Juma mosque keeps a different kind of wonder: a low, dim hall held up by more than two hundred carved wooden columns, some of them a thousand years old, cool and hushed after all that glazed brick outside. It is the one place in Khiva where nobody hurries, light coming down in shafts between the pillars and the smell of old cedar in the air.
Reaching all this used to be a real undertaking, and now it is not. A Spanish-built fast train runs the spine of the country, Samarkand a little over two hours from Tashkent, and most travellers, Americans included since the start of this year, arrive without a visa. The crowds so far are largely Uzbek and regional, more than eight million visitors in 2024 and climbing, with the Western share only starting to show. It is easier to reach now than it has been in a hundred years, and it will not stay this quiet.
