Captivated by Khiva

It’s hard for me to credit how long it’s been since I started writing about this trip, and abandoned it short of Khiva. Now that Covid-19 has put future travels even further off, I thought I might finish at least the Uzbekistan leg of this trip.

September 20-22, 2016

As I believe I wrote earlier, I chose Uzbekistan for my first (and now maybe only) foray into Central Asia principally for the cities of Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva, and when I looked for a small group tour my non-negotiable requirements were the Ferghana Valley, at least three nights in both Samarkand and Bukhara, and time in Khiva. While the Ferghana Valley did not fully repay the night in the desert and our upcoming visit to Nukus, Samarkand and Bukhara had been ample recompense, and so was Khiva.

Samarkand and Bukhara are now cities with sights, only Khiva retains the atmosphere all three once shared: an oasis in the desert, a haven of safety and succor for the caravaners at the end of a hazardous journey on the Silk Road. Our journey had been in no way a mirror of theirs, but Khiva, drowsing behind its formidable walls, was a no less welcome sight. The drive from Bukhara through the Kyzyl Kum desert had been long and boring, and the packed lunch unsatisfying. We spent two nights in an undistinguished tourist hotel outside the walls, with no in-room wifi and biting insects in the common areas. The daytime temperatures were, once again, in the 90s. Despite this, Khiva enchanted me, especially as the evening light painted the walls and minarets in shades of gold.

While the Khievak Well, the reason for the town’s existence, is said to have been discovered by Noah’s son Shem, and it was always a stop on the trade route, it did not become politically significant until the end of the 1500s. For the next three hundred years it was the center of a slave trade and of tribal rivalries. Russia objected to the slave trade (in Russians), and coveted the city as a gateway to British India, but it took three expensive attempts before the city fell in 1873. It survived the tsarist troops, the fall of the khanate and the later transition to Soviet rule to become, in 1967, a museum city. Amazingly, parts of the encircling walls are said to date from the fifth century, although the major sections were built in the 1680s.

As soon as we had checked into the hotel the first evening, we walked up the street and through the gates into the old town, where we almost immediately encountered woodworkers, one of them a young boy. But while there were certainly goods for sale to tourists, their vendors were not pushy, and after all, this had always been a trading town. The next morning a guide took us round the major buildings, the mosques and madrassas and the Tash-Hauli Palace, and I admired the tile work and then the forest of wooden pillars in the atmospheric Dzhuna Mosque, but I abandoned to guide after lunch as it got hotter and cooled off back in the hotel. Of course I went back later on, and was actually happier wandering the streets on my own, discovering new angles on the main buildings, and quiet residential streets in odd corners. It was a great place to get lost, and of course it would be hard to stay lost, enclosed by walls and with minarets as landmarks. I was sorry to leave the next morning.