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Photo: o_s_t_a_p, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Built in the 16th century, with beautiful interior decorations, but you'll be lucky to find it open. Worshippers now use the modern mosque next to it.
Baland Mosque, which means the "upper mosque", is a historical mosque in the ancient city of Bukhara, Uzbekistan. Registered as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO along with the whole of the historic old town, this small mosque was built at the beginning of the 16th century in the southern part of the city.
© OpenStreetMap contributors
The name means "double madrassah", the Modari Khan and the larger Abdullah Khan, built together in 1566. They look neglected.
The Samanids were a Persian dynasty in power 819-945. In 892 Ismail Samani united its four petty kingdoms, broke from Abbasid influence, and moved the capital from Samarkand to Bukhara. He built this mausoleum for his father and lay here himself from 907. It's the oldest Muslim monument in Bukhara, with elements of Zoroastrian design such as the sun motif.
The mosque was built in 1712, with a free-standing minaret and painted wooden pillars added in 1917. In front is a small hauz.
The name means "spring of Ayub" - Job - who in legend struck the ground with his staff and out gushed a spring. Bukhara was one of several cities where he performed this feat and was subsequently buried; the oldest authenticated burial here was of Khwaja Hafiz Gunjari in 1022 AD. The entrance portal is from 1208, but the mausoleum is from 1380 in the reign of Timur, with a Khwarazm-style conical dome. The site was extended in the 15th century and has a small museum about the Sunni Islamic scholar Muhammad al-Bukhari (810-870), whose tomb is in Samarkand.
Xoʻjayev (1896-1938) was from a wealthy Bukhara family. He sought to free his country from both hidebound clerical tradition and Czarist rule, which pleased the Soviets, and he was leader of Uzbekistan from 1924. However he opposed the heavy-handed excesses of Stalin, such as cotton monoculture, so he was purged, given a show trial and shot. He has a mixed reputation today and this museum, his father's house, depicts life of a merchant family but says little about the man.
Citadel or kremlin that contained palaces, temples, barracks, offices, the mint, warehouses, workshops, stables, an arsenal; everything a ruler might want for his comfort, and for the misery of his captives. It's a heptagonal enclosure (said to be patterned on the constellation of Ursa Major) with earth brick walls up to 20 m tall. It was built and re-built for millennia, taking its present form under the Shaybhanid dynasty around 1500. You enter through the grand west gate and see the museum, throne room, royal courts and mosque. The eastern half has not been restored.