Po-i-Kalyan

Interesting facts

The name Po-i-Kalyan means 'at the foot of the Great One', a reference to the minaret that towers over the square.

The minaret was long known as the Tower of Death, because condemned criminals were thrown from its lantern gallery into the early twentieth century.

According to legend, the master builder Bako laid the foundation with a mortar mixed with camel milk, then vanished for two years until it had set hard.

Archaeologists dug 13 metres down beside the minaret without reaching the bottom of its brick foundation.

Its bricks were laid with gypsum mortar that over the centuries fused with them into a near-monolithic mass, which helps explain its survival.

In Central Asia only the Kutlug-Timur minaret in Kunya-Urgench has a wider base than the Kalyan Minaret.

An arched footbridge links the minaret to the roof of the Friday mosque, and a spiral brick staircase winds up inside the shaft to the lantern.

The Mir-i-Arab Madrasa is said to have been funded by Ubaydullah Khan's sale of some three thousand Persian captives taken in his wars with Iran.

Ubaydullah Khan chose to be buried not in a mausoleum of his own but beside his spiritual mentor inside the Mir-i-Arab Madrasa.

In Soviet times Mir-i-Arab was one of very few Islamic schools in the country allowed to keep teaching.

Why it is worth it

Po-i-Kalyan is the religious heart of old Bukhara: a square framed by a vast Friday mosque on one side and a working madrasa on the other, with a single brick tower rising between them. That tower, the Kalyan Minaret, was commissioned by the Karakhanid ruler Arslan Khan and completed in 1127. It stands about 46 metres high on a base some nine metres across, built entirely of baked brick, and it is the oldest part of the ensemble by four centuries.

The minaret's beauty is all in its brick. Its builders laid the bricks in a series of narrow horizontal bands, some straight, some diagonal, mixed with geometric patterns and Kufic lettering, so that the shaft is wrapped in texture that changes with the angle of the sun; only one frieze carries blue glaze. At the top, a cylindrical lantern opens in sixteen arches beneath a stalactite cornice. Tradition tells that about a century after it was built, Genghis Khan was so impressed by the minaret that he ordered it spared while his men destroyed everything around it; whatever the truth, the tower survived, and the mosque of its time did not.

The Kalyan Mosque that faces the square today was completed in 1514–15 under Ubaydullah Khan. It is enormous — about 130 by 81 metres — and built on the classic Central Asian plan of a courtyard with four iwans, surrounded by a hypostyle arcade roofed with 288 small domes. At its end the turquoise dome of the main sanctuary rises some 30 metres. Across the square stands the Mir-i-Arab Madrasa of 1535, with its own mosque and mausoleum; it was founded by a sheikh from Yemen and has functioned as a religious school almost without interruption, which is rare in Central Asia. The square is at its most beautiful at dusk, when the brick turns honey-coloured and the domes glow against a fading sky.

Getting there

Po-i-Kalyan is in the historic centre of Bukhara, about 1.5 km from the city centre point, within walking distance of the old town's other monuments. Bukhara International Airport (BHK) is about 6 km away, a short taxi ride.

Po-i-Kalyan

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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