Kunya-Urgench

Kunya-Urgench, “old Urgench”, lies in the north of Turkmenistan, close to the border with Uzbekistan, on what was once the bank of the Amu Darya, the Oxus. In Persian it was Gurganj, and in Arabic Jurjaniyya. It was for centuries the capital of Khwarazm, the land of the lower Oxus, and in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries the seat of the Khwarazmshahs, whose empire briefly stretched across Iran and Central Asia. UNESCO inscribed its monuments in 2005.

In 1221 the armies of Genghis Khan took the city after a long siege, and according to the chronicles they broke the dams of the Oxus and flooded what remained. Gurganj rose again under the Golden Horde as a rich trading city, and the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta admired it in the 1330s. In 1388 Timur destroyed it once more, and later the river changed its course, leaving the old city to the desert.

Scattered across a wide plain stand the survivors. The minaret of Kutlug Timur, about sixty metres tall and banded with patterns in brick, is among the tallest in Central Asia. The mausoleum of Il-Arslan, a twelfth-century Khwarazmshah, has a conical twelve-sided dome faced with turquoise tiles; that of his son Tekesh is crowned by a conical turquoise roof; and the fourteenth-century mausoleum of Turabek Khanum has an inner dome covered in a shimmering mosaic of stars and flowers.

Kunya-Urgench is also a living place of pilgrimage. Many Turkmen visit the tomb of the Sufi master Najm al-Din Kubra, killed defending the city in 1221, and other shrines around the site, walking between the ancient mausoleums as part of their visit.