Samarkand Group Day Tour: Five Monuments with a Local Guide

Samarkand was Timur's capital and he built it to be seen. Six hundred years later the monuments he and his grandson left are still the largest things in the city, and they are still turquoise. This is one day covering the ones that matter, with a licensed guide and a vehicle between them, so the hours go on the monuments rather than on crossing the city.

What you see

• The Registan — three madrasahs around one square, built across two and a half centuries: Ulugh Beg's in the 1420s, the Sher-Dor with its lions and its human-faced suns in the 1600s, and the Tilya-Kori, whose gold-leaf prayer hall is the reason people stop talking when they walk in
• Gur-e-Amir, Timur's own tomb beneath a fluted turquoise dome, with his sons and his grandson Ulugh Beg buried around him
• Bibi-Khanym, the mosque Timur raised after the Indian campaign, meant to be the largest in the Islamic world. It began falling down almost as soon as it was finished — ambition and brick do not always agree
• Siab Bazaar, next door and still the city's working market: the bread Samarkand is famous for, dried apricots, nuts, and the people buying them
• Shah-i-Zinda, a narrow street of mausoleums climbing the hillside, added to from the 11th to the 19th century (mostly 14th–15th), and the densest tilework in Central Asia
• Ulugh Beg's observatory, where a grandson of Timur built a sextant with a radius of 36 metres, measured the length of the year to within a minute of the figure we use today, and catalogued close to a thousand stars by 1437. Only the underground arc of the instrument survives, cut into the rock

How the day goes

Five to seven hours, with a vehicle between the sites — the monuments are spread across Samarkand and the observatory is out on the edge of town, so this is not a walking tour. The walking is inside each monument, and the pace inside is yours.

Summer is hot and the squares have no shade at all. From June to September an early start is worth the alarm clock. Afternoon departures run from March to November; from December to February, please choose a morning departure.

Who it suits

Anyone with a single day in Samarkand. Alone, these buildings are enormous and silent and give nothing away. A guide is what turns them from a set of photographs into one story — the man who built a capital to be seen from the road, and the grandson who ignored all of it and measured the stars instead.