Khiva Walking Tour: Ichan Kala in 4–6 Hours

Khiva's walled inner city, Ichan Kala, is about 26 hectares of mud-brick walls with some fifty monuments inside them and almost nothing modern. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1990. It is also small enough to cross on foot in fifteen minutes, which is why the only sensible way to see it is walking — and why a guide matters more here than almost anywhere else in Uzbekistan. The buildings stand shoulder to shoulder with no labels on them. Without someone to tell you what you are looking at, Ichan Kala is a beautiful place you walk through in an hour.

This is four to six hours inside the walls with a licensed guide.

What you see

• Ota Darvoza, the west gate — the way the caravans came in, and still the main entrance
• Kalta Minor, the broad turquoise minaret begun in the 1850s and abandoned when the khan who ordered it died. It was meant to be the tallest in the Muslim world. It is the most photographed building in Uzbekistan and it was never finished
• Kunya-Ark, the citadel and the khan's own residence, with the summer mosque and the watchtower that gives you the view over the whole walled city
• The Juma Mosque, which has no dome, no portal and no courtyard — just a flat roof held up by more than two hundred carved wooden columns, the oldest of them centuries older than the mosque around them, lit by daylight falling through openings in the roof
• Tash Khauli, the stone palace Allakuli Khan built in the 1830s, and its harem courtyard of tiled aivans
• The Pakhlavan Mahmud mausoleum — poet, furrier, undefeated wrestler and the patron saint of Khiva, under the finest blue tilework in the city
• The Islam Khoja minaret, 56.6 metres and the tallest in Khiva, finished in 1910 and the last great thing the khanate built
• Allakuli Khan's covered bazaar, the Shirgazi Khan madrasah and the Arab Muhammad Khan madrasah

How the day goes

Four to six hours, almost all of it on foot and all of it inside the walls, with a break for lunch roughly halfway. The ground is uneven and there are stairs at the citadel and the minaret, but nothing is far from anything else — a few minutes separate each monument from the next, so the pace is yours rather than the itinerary's.

Summer afternoons are genuinely hot and there is little shade, so from June to September a morning start is better. Wear shoes you can walk on cobbles in.

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

Who it suits

Anyone with one day in Khiva who would rather understand it than photograph it. It works for a first visit, and it works for people who have already walked inside the walls alone and want to know what they were looking at.