Shah-i-Zinda

Interesting facts

Until the 16th century the complex was known simply as the Mazar of the Shah; the name Shah-i-Zinda, the Living King, only took hold afterwards.

Excavations on the eastern slope of the Afrasiyab hill uncovered the remains of 11th–12th-century mausoleums from the Karakhanid era, long before Timur's builders arrived.

A two-leaf carved wooden door, made in 1404–1405 on Timur's orders by master Said Yusuf Sherozi, was originally inlaid with ivory inscriptions.

The cenotaph over the grave of Qutham ibn Abbas, made in the 1380s, carries Quranic verses written in gold and the year 57 AH, 676–677 AD.

Fragments of carved wood from a mosque built before the Mongol invasion survive in the Qutham ibn Abbas complex, a rare relic of Karakhanid craftsmanship.

The tomb of Timur's niece, finished in 1371–1372, names its builders: the masters Shamseddin, Bareddin and Zainuddin of Bukhara.

In 1945 the Soviet authorities of Uzbekistan handed Shah-i-Zinda back to Muslim religious administration, one of seven heavily visited shrines returned at the time.

No new burials have been made at the necropolis since 1977, ending roughly nine centuries of use as a cemetery for the powerful and pious.

The Qutham ibn Abbas complex was restored in 1998–2000 with money provided by the Kingdom of Jordan.

Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky photographed the necropolis and its tiled portals in colour in the early 20th century.

Why it is worth it

Shah-i-Zinda is less a single monument than a street of the dead: a narrow lane climbing the slope south of the old Afrosiyob hill in Samarkand, lined on both sides by mausoleums whose portals are sheathed in glazed tilework. The name means "the Living King" and comes from Qutham ibn Abbas, a cousin of the Prophet Muhammad who reached Samarkand with the Arab conquest in the seventh century. Local tradition holds that he was beheaded while praying, took up his own head and walked down into a deep well, where he lives on. His shrine made this hillside holy ground, and for some eight centuries the powerful wanted to be buried close to it.

The ensemble grew from the eleventh century to the nineteenth and now counts more than twenty buildings, arranged in lower, middle and upper groups linked by domed four-arched passages. Most of what the visitor sees dates from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when Timur's family, generals and clergy commissioned tombs here: the single-chambered tomb of his niece, built in 1372, the mausoleum of his sister Shirin Bika Aka opposite it, an unusual eight-sided crypt, and in the upper group the Khodja Akhmad mausoleum of the 1340s. At the foot of the complex, the entrance gate and a double-domed mausoleum were raised under Ulugh Beg in 1434–1435.

What makes the place unforgettable is the density of ornament in a very small space. Glazed tilework and carved terracotta cover facades that stand only a few metres apart, so the eye moves from one portal to the next as if through the pages of a manuscript. The steep brick stairway of about forty steps at the entrance replaced an older one that had fallen into ruin in the eighteenth century. Shah-i-Zinda is part of the UNESCO World Heritage property "Samarkand – Crossroad of Cultures", inscribed in 2001, and remains a place of pilgrimage as well as one of the city's great sights.

Getting there

The necropolis lies on the north-eastern edge of central Samarkand, about 2 km from the city centre. Samarkand International Airport (SKD) is about 4.4 km away; Tashkent International Airport (TAS), the country's main international gateway, is roughly 260 km to the north-east.

Shah-i-Zinda

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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