Chor Minor

Four squat towers crowned with sky-blue domes rise from a small brick gatehouse hidden among the houses of old Bukhara, and the building's Persian name, Chor Minor, simply means "four minarets". Yet they are not minarets at all: the structure is the gateway of a vanished madrasa, and its towers held a staircase and storerooms. Nothing else in the architecture of Bukhara resembles it, and what inspired its patron remains unknown.

Bukhara, for centuries one of the great centres of learning on the Silk Road, preserves a historic core of mosques, madrasas, caravanserais and pools that is inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, and Chor Minor stands in a lane northeast of the Lyab-i Hauz ensemble. It was built in the first decade of the 19th century, under the Manghit ruler Haydar, at the expense of Khalif Niyaz-kul, a wealthy Bukharan of Turkmen origin who served as imam of the Kalyan Mosque, the city's principal mosque. His madrasa broke with every convention of the type: instead of a regular courtyard ringed by student cells, it had an irregular yard with 59 large and small cells, a mosque in one corner, stables where prized Karabair horses were kept for sale, and a large garden. It worked as a school with a rich library and as a Sufi centre until the Soviet period; most of it was later taken apart for its bricks, leaving the gatehouse, fragments of the cells and a pool that probably dates from the same time.

The gatehouse is a two-storey domed building. The lower floor serves as a vestibule; the upper one, reached by a staircase inside one of the towers, held the library beneath a shallow dome on a ring of simple muqarnas, and its acoustics suited the chanting of Sufi dhikr ceremonies. The other three towers were used for storage. Each tower carries a different pattern in its brick and tile decoration, and a popular interpretation sees in the motifs symbols of the faiths known in Central Asia — a cross, a fish, a Buddhist prayer wheel, alongside Zoroastrian and Islamic signs.

Getting there

Chor Minor stands in the historic centre of Bukhara, a short walk northeast of Lyab-i Hauz. The nearest airport is Bukhara International Airport (BHK), about 5 km away.