Bukhara Walking Tour: Ark and Kalyan Minaret

Bukhara is the one Silk Road city you do not need a car for. The old town is still the old town — a square kilometre of madrasahs, trading domes and houses, nearly all of it within twenty minutes of a single pool — and almost all of it is still in use. This is four to six hours of it on foot with a licensed guide, from the pool where the city still meets to the oldest building in Bukhara.

What you see

• Lyab-i Hauz, the pool of 1620 and the shaded square around it, where the city still sits in the evening. Bukhara had dozens of pools like it; the Soviets filled almost all of them in because the water carried disease, and this one survived
• The trading domes — the jewellers', the hatmakers' and the moneychangers' — crossroads roofed over in the 16th century, still selling, still the shortest way across town
• The Magoki Attari mosque, one of the oldest in the city, sunk below the modern street level because the street rose around it over the centuries, with a carpet collection inside
• The Ulugbek madrasah of 1417, the oldest of the three the astronomer prince built, facing the Abdulaziz Khan madrasah put up two hundred and thirty-five years later — two centuries of architecture arguing across one street
• Poi Kalyan and its minaret: 1127, about forty-six metres of baked brick, nine metres across at the foot. It called the city to prayer, it served as a lookout, and the story every guide tells is that Genghis Khan ordered it left standing while the rest of Bukhara came down. Whether that is history or a good story, it is one of the few things here older than the Mongols
• The Ark, the emir's fortress and a walled city of its own, lived in for well over a thousand years and left as it was after 1920
• Bolo Hauz, the emir's own mosque of 1712, twenty painted wooden columns on the porch that become forty in the reflection of the pool
• The Samanid mausoleum, from around the tenth century and the oldest surviving monument in Bukhara. No tiles, no colour — just baked brick laid in patterns that change all day as the sun moves across them

How the day goes

Four to six hours, all on foot, all within the old city. Nothing is more than twenty minutes from anything else, there is a break for lunch, and the distances are short enough that the pace is set by how long you want to stand and look.

The summer middle of the day is hot and the squares have little shade. Shoes for uneven brick.

Afternoon departures run from March to November; from December to February, please choose a morning departure.

Who it suits

A small group — up to twenty people with one guide, never more — with a day in Bukhara. The buildings here are closer together and lower than Samarkand's, which makes them easier to walk and harder to read: half of what matters is a doorway, a brick pattern or a door that is older than the wall around it. That is what the guide is for.