Day 23 Bukhara (6th June) – David Jenny Travel

We went to see the Great Ark after walking about a mile in entirely the wrong direction after Google Maps took us to the Great Ark Bukhara hotel. A man offered to take us to the Great Ark and wanted 100,000 sons ($7) which was reasonable but took two 100,000 som notes out of my wallet. The thieving bastard. The Ark was interesting; we paid £5 to get in and a sloping path through the very thick walls had cells for convicts in the thickness of the walls. The Ark dates back to 4^th century BC but was essentially built in the 5^th century AD as a fortress and palace of the Emir. Most of it was flattened by the Bolsheviks in 1920. Its inhabitants have included Ferdowsi, Avicenna and Omar Khayam.

We went inside the Juma Mosque, which was first built in 713 on the ruins of a Zoroastrian temple. It is now a small museum containing, among other things, two pages of a 10^th century Koran. We also saw the building which had been the Russian consulate in the 1880’s and where the remains of 20 members of a Bolshevik delegation who were slaughtered by the Emir in 1918 are buried. There is also a natural history museum with stuffed exotic creatures.

We then walked to the Kalon Tower across the Registan (place of sand where camels were kept so they didn’t hurt their feet on stone roads. The Registan is where Colonels Stoddart and Connolly were beheaded after trying to get the Emir to join Britain in the Great Game. Among many blunders, they didn’t bring a present from Queen Victoria. Stoddart spent nearly 4 years in the Bug Pit at Zindon Prison, where the jailers threw scorpions, bugs and rats onto him and Connolly spent one year in it while the Emir tried to ransom them.

The Kalon Tower, a short distance from the Ark, was built in 1127. It is 48 metres high and the architect, Bako, was buried 48 metres away so that its head would fall on him if it collapsed. Criminals were thrown off the top in a sack. When Genghis Khan destroyed Bukhara, he spared the