Bibi-Khanym Mosque — mosque
Image by LoggaWiggler from Pixabay

Bibi-Khanym Mosque

  • 2 min read
  • 39.661° N 66.980° E

Interesting facts

  • About 500 people built the mosque, including some 200 architects, artists and masons drawn from across Timur's empire, helped by 95 Indian elephants.
  • Many of its builders were craftsmen from Persia and India, lands Timur had just conquered, brought to Samarkand to serve his new capital.
  • The Castilian envoy Ruy González de Clavijo saw the mosque in 1404 and judged it the noblest building in Samarkand.
  • Timur, finding the entrance portal too low on his return in 1404, ordered it pulled down and rebuilt in haste.
  • The mosque was meant to hold the entire male population of Samarkand for Friday prayers at one time.
  • Inside the walls, the open courtyard alone measures about 78 by 64 metres.
  • According to legend, the architect fell in love with Bibi-Khanym and demanded a kiss; it left a mark, and Timur had him put to death.
  • The giant marble lectern in the courtyard is said to have once held the celebrated Uthman Quran, one of the oldest Qurans in existence.
  • Local belief held that a woman who crawled beneath the marble lectern would be blessed with many children, until a glass case enclosed it in 2023.

Why it is worth it

The Bibi-Khanym Mosque was meant to be the greatest mosque in the world, and for a while it may have been. Timur ordered it in 1399, on his return from the Indian campaign, to crown his new capital of Samarkand; the work was nearly finished when he came back from his next campaign in 1404, and, displeased, he had the main dome altered on the spot. The mosque carries the name of his senior wife, Saray Mulk Khanum, and tradition credits her with commissioning it. It is counted among the masterpieces of the Timurid age, and its ambition influenced building across Central Asia, Iran and Afghanistan.

The scale is still overwhelming. The walls enclose a rectangle about 167 by 109 metres, oriented towards Mecca, and you enter through a portal some 35 metres high into a vast courtyard. Opposite rises the main sanctuary, its great dome about 40 metres high, hidden from the courtyard behind the huge framed arch of its iwan; two smaller domed halls face each other across the long sides, completing the classic four-iwan plan. The domes use a double shell, a lower inner vault shaped for the prayer hall and a taller outer dome built for effect, and the side domes are melon-shaped and ribbed. In the middle of the courtyard stands a giant marble Quran stand from Timur's time. Once more than 400 marble columns carried the galleries around the court; only traces of them remain.

Built too fast and too big, the mosque began to shed bricks from its dome within a few years. From the late sixteenth century it was left to decay, townspeople carried off bricks and marble, and an earthquake in 1897 brought down the inner arch of the portal; early colour photographs from the 1900s show a magnificent broken shell. Restoration began under the Soviets and a full reconstruction started in 1974, which rebuilt the domes and much of the tilework; a new restoration programme with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture was agreed in 2024. Look closely and you can still tell old brick from new, and the contrast is part of the story. Photographs of the 1890s show a market square spread before its gates, and the mosque still stands among the everyday life of the city rather than apart from it.

Getting there

The mosque is in central Samarkand, Uzbekistan, which also holds the other great Timurid monuments of the city, the Registan, the Gur-e Amir and the Shah-i-Zinda necropolis. Samarkand International Airport (SKD) is about 5 km away. Afrosiyob high-speed trains link Tashkent with Samarkand in about two and a quarter hours.

Plan your visit

We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.

Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Uzbekistan 13The Most Beautiful Mosques in Uzbekistan 6The Most Beautiful Sacred Places in Uzbekistan 8The Most Beautiful Medieval Mosques 12The Most Beautiful Mosques 61The Most Beautiful Medieval Sacred Places 123The Most Beautiful Medieval Places 204The Most Beautiful Sacred Places 623

From the encyclopaedia

The Bibi-Khanym Mosque is one of the most important monuments of Samarkand, Uzbekistan. In the 15th century, it was one of the largest and most magnificent mosques in the Islamic world. It is considered a masterpiece of the Timurid Renaissance. By the mid-20th century, only a grandiose ruin of it still survived, but major parts of the mosque were restored during the Soviet period.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

39.66056, 66.97972per Wikidata