Itchan Kala, Khiva

Itchan Kala is the walled inner town of Khiva, an oasis city in the delta of the Amu Darya, south of the Aral Sea, in the old region of Khwarazm. Kala means fortress or walled town. Inside its walls of mud brick stand palaces, mosques, madrasas, mausoleums and houses, most of them built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when Khiva was the capital of an independent khanate. It was the first site in Central Asia to be inscribed by UNESCO, in 1990.

The walls, about ten metres high, are rounded and buttressed, and four gates open towards the points of the compass. Within, the low skyline is broken by domes and minarets. The most striking is Kalta Minor, “the short minaret”, a broad stump covered entirely in turquoise and blue glazed tile, begun in the 1850s by a khan who meant it to be the tallest in the Islamic world, and left unfinished after his death. Nearby, the slender Islam Khodja minaret, finished in 1910, is now the tallest in Khiva.

The Juma mosque is notable for its forest of more than two hundred carved wooden columns, some much older than the building. Walking the compact, sand-coloured lanes, with tiled portals and carved doors on every side, gives a rare sense of a complete town of the old Central Asian world, though it is now largely a living museum.