Kalyan Minaret

Stand at the foot of the tower and put your palm flat against the brick. It is warm, even in the early morning, and slightly rough, like fine sandpaper. Now tilt your head back. The column rises and narrows above you, a single shaft of honey-coloured brick against the pale Bukhara sky. Pigeons circle near the top. Somewhere behind you, footsteps echo across the square. This is the Kalyan Minaret, and for almost nine hundred years it has been the tallest thing in the old city.

The name comes from the Persian word for great. Locals simply call it the Great Minaret. It was completed in 1127, under a ruler of the Karakhanid dynasty named Arslan Khan. The Karakhanids were a Turkic dynasty, a family of rulers who governed much of Central Asia in that period. Bukhara was already an old and important city by then. It sat on the trade routes we now call the Silk Road, and its scholars were known across the Islamic world.

A minaret has one main purpose. It is the tower from which the call to prayer is given, five times a day. But this tower did more than that. From the top, a person could see far across the flat land around the city. Historians believe it also worked as a watchtower. Fires lit in the high lantern may have guided caravans across the desert at night — a lighthouse with no sea in sight.

Look at how the shape changes as it rises. The base is wide and heavy. The column tapers gently, growing thinner with height, which gives it strength and stability. The builders also dug deep. The foundation goes far below the ground you are standing on, and this is one reason the tower has survived earthquakes that destroyed many other buildings in the region. Local storytellers say an earlier minaret on this site collapsed, and that the builders learned from that failure.

Now comes the first surprise. The whole tower is made of one simple material — fired brick. There is no carved stone, and almost no colour. And yet the surface is covered in pattern. The bricks are laid in different ways in different bands. Some sit flat, some stand on edge, some are set at angles to form diamonds, zigzags and knots. As the sun moves, each band throws a different kind of shadow. The tower changes its texture through the day.

Count the bands if you can. There are many of them, stacked one above another, and no two are quite the same. Between some of them run narrow strips of writing in Arabic script, also formed from brick. Near the top, look for a thin ring of blue. That is glazed tile. It is a small detail, but it is one of the earliest uses of blue glazed tile in Central Asia. The turquoise domes you see across Bukhara and Samarkand today grow from beginnings like this one.

At the very top sits a round lantern with a ring of arched openings. This is where the muezzin, the man who gives the call to prayer, would stand. Above it, a small crown of brick closes the tower. Inside the shaft, a spiral staircase winds up through the brick core. The interior is usually closed to visitors today, so the view from the top belongs mostly to the pigeons and to the imagination.

Now for the most famous story connected to this place. In 1220, the armies of Genghis Khan reached Bukhara. The Mongols burned and destroyed much of the city. Yet the minaret still stands. According to a popular legend, Genghis Khan stood at the base and looked up. His hat fell from his head, and he bent down to pick it up. He decided that a tower which made him bow should not be destroyed. It is a good tale. Historians cannot confirm it, but the tower did survive.

There is a darker story too. In later centuries, people sometimes called this the Tower of Death. Travellers and local accounts describe condemned criminals being thrown from the top as a public punishment. How often this happened, and for how long, is hard to know. Some details have likely grown in the retelling. But the nickname stayed, and it shows how this tower was tied to power as well as to prayer.

Turn around slowly and look at what surrounds you. The minaret is the centre of an ensemble known as Po-i-Kalyan, which means at the foot of the Great One. To one side stands the Kalyan Mosque, a huge Friday mosque rebuilt in its present form in the sixteenth century. Opposite it rises the Mir-i-Arab Madrasa, a religious school with two blue domes. The madrasa still trains students today, so treat its entrance with quiet respect.

Here is the second surprise. The minaret is older than both of the buildings around it, by roughly four hundred years. The mosque and the madrasa were built to face each other across the square, with the tower already standing between them. In a sense, the later builders arranged the whole square around this older column. A small bridge once connected the mosque roof to the minaret, so the muezzin could reach the tower from inside the mosque.

The tower has not passed through the centuries untouched. Fighting in the early twentieth century damaged parts of the old city, and the minaret carried scars from that period. Restorers repaired the brickwork during the Soviet era and again in more recent decades. If you look closely, you may notice that some bricks are slightly different in colour from their neighbours. Those small differences show where old work and new work meet.

As evening comes, the square changes. The heat lifts from the paving stones. The brick turns from pale gold to deep amber, and then to a soft rose colour as the sun goes down. Lights come on at the base of the buildings, and the patterns in the brick stand out sharply against the darkening sky. Families walk across the square, and children chase the pigeons. This is one of the best times to sit for a while and simply watch.

Before you leave, put your hand on the brick once more. People have been standing exactly here for almost nine centuries — traders, scholars, soldiers, pilgrims, and now you. The call to prayer still sounds across this square. As you walk away through the old streets, turn back every so often. From almost every corner of old Bukhara, you will find the Great Minaret rising above the rooftops, quietly keeping its place in the sky.