Bukhara ( buu-KHAR-ə) is the seventh-largest city in Uzbekistan by population, with 305,500 residents as of 2026. It is the capital of Bukhara Region. Since ancient times, Bukhara was one of the most prosperous cities in Transoxiana alongside neighbouring Samarkand owing to its location on Silk Road. Today its historic core is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Dating to pre-Islamic antiquity, Bukhara became a major centre of Islamic sciences and scholarship during the Islamic Golden Age. It was the birthplace of the scholar Imam Bukhari. Bukhara was a major city in the Samanid Empire, and later, in the Karakhanid Khanate; both empires have left monuments such as Samanid Mausoleum and Kalan Minaret in the city. Bukhara was devastated during the Mongol invasion under Genghis Khan in the 13th century but recovered under the Timurid Empire in the next century. It became capital of the Uzbek Khanate of Bukhara in the 16th century. The Uzbek state added a number of monuments, mosques and madrasas, such as the Po-i-Kalyan complex to the landscape of the city. The Emirate of Bukhara was abolished after the Russian Revolution in 1920, and the Bukhara People’s Soviet Republic was created, later transformed into Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic in 1924.
Bukhara has about 140 architectural monuments, including the massive fortifications of Ark of Bukhara. UNESCO has listed the historic center of Bukhara (which contains numerous mosques and madrasas) as a World Heritage Site.
Names
The exact name of the city of Bukhara in ancient times is unknown. The whole oasis was called Bukhara in ancient times, and probably only in the tenth century was it finally transferred to the city.
According to some scholars, the name dates back to the Sanskrit vihāra (Buddhist monastery). This word is very close to the word in the language of the Uyghur and Chinese Buddhists, who named their places of worship the same way. Very few artifacts related to Buddhism have survived into the modern day in the city. But, numerous Arabic, Persian, European and Chinese travellers and historians noted the place and Transoxiana itself to be once populated by mostly Buddhists and few Zoroastrians. Indeed, the first Islamic text on Bukhara relates to the first Arab invader of Bukhara, Ubaidullah bin Ziad, who noted Bukhara to be a Buddhist country with Buddhist monasteries ruled by a queen regent acting on behalf of her son.
According to other sources (such as Encyclopædia Iranica), the name Bukhara is possibly derived from the Sogdian βuxārak ('Place of Good Fortune'), a name for Buddhist monasteries.
In the Tang dynasty, and other successive dynasties of Imperial China, Bukhara was known under the name of Bǔhē (捕喝), which has been replaced in Chinese by the modern generic phonetic spelling Bùhālā (布哈拉).
Between the 19th and 20th centuries, Bukhara was known as Bokhara in the English publications as exemplified by the writings and reports on the Emirate of Bukhara during the Great Game.
Muhammad ibn Jafar Narshakhi in his History of Bukhara (completed AD 943–44) mentions:
Bukhara has many names. One of its names was Numijkat. It has also been called "Bumiskat". It has 2 names in Arabic. One is "Madinat al Sufriya" meaning—"the copper city" and another is "Madinat Al Tujjar" meaning—"The city of Merchants". But, the name Bukhara is the original name and more known than all the other names. In Khorasan, there is no other city with so many names.
Since the Middle Ages, the city has been known as Bukhārā / بخارا in Arabic and Persian sources. The modern Uzbek spelling is Buxoro.
The city's name was mythologized as Albracca in the Italian epic poem Orlando Innamorato, published in 1483 by Matteo Maria Boiardo.
History
The history of Bukhara stretches back millennia. Along with Samarkand, Bukhara was the epicentre of Persian culture in medieval Central Asia until the fall of Timurid dynasty. Located west of Samarkand, it was a prominent center of learning, well-known throughout the Persian and Islamic world. It served as the most important of cities in many Persianate empires, including Samanids, Karakhanids, Khwarazmians, and Timurids. The historic center of Bukhara, which contains numerous mosques and madrassas, has been listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.
By 850, Bukhara served as the capital of the Samanid Empire, and was the birthplace of Imam Bukhari. The Samanids claimed descent from Bahram Chobin, the Sasanian general and king. They rejuvenated Persian culture far from Baghdad, the centre of the Islamic world. New Persian flourished in Bukhara. Rudaki, the father of Persian poetry, was born and raised in Bukhara and wrote his most famous poem about the beauty of the city. Located on the Silk Road, the city became a center of trade, scholarship, culture, and religion. During the golden age of the Samanids, Bukhara was a major intellectual center of the Islamic world, renowned for its numerous libraries.
At the beginning of the 11th century, Bukhara became part of the Turkic Kara-Khanid Khanate. The Karakhanids built many buildings in Bukhara: the Kalyan Minaret, the Magok-i-Attari Mosque, palaces and parks. Genghis Khan besieged Bukhara for 15 days in 1220, followed by its complete destruction.
As an important trading centre, Bukhara was home to a community of medieval merchants from the city of Multan (present-day Pakistan) who were noted to own land in the city. Bukhara was the old neighborhood of Sheikh Baha' al-Din Naqshband. He was a central figure in the development of the Naqshbandi Sufi order, significantly influencing the mystical Sufi approach to spirituality, theology, and Islamic practice. The influence of Bukhara in the wider Islamic world started to diminish after the arrival of Turkic dynasty of Uzbeks in the 16th century. For several centuries, the cities of Bukhara and Khiva were known as major centers of the slave trade, and due to the Bukhara slave trade, alongside the neighboring slave trade in Khiva, both have been referred to as the "slave capitals of the world".
Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar was the last Persian emperor who attempted to capture the city just before his assassination, and by the 19th century the city had become a peripheral city in the Persian and the Islamic world, being ruled by local Emirs of Bukhara, who were the last Persianate princes before the fall of the city to the Red Army.
Bukhara was the last capital of the Emirate of Bukhara and was besieged by the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. During the Bukhara operation of 1920, Red Army troops under the command of Bolshevik general Mikhail Frunze attacked the city of Bukhara. On 31 August 1920, the Emir Mohammed Alim Khan fled to Dushanbe in Eastern Bukhara (later he escaped from Dushanbe to Kabul in Afghanistan). On 2 September 1920, after four days of fighting, the emir's citadel (the Ark) was destroyed and the red flag was raised from the top of Kalyan Minaret. On 14 September 1920, the All-Bukharan Revolutionary Committee was set up, headed by A. Mukhitdinov. The government—the Council of People's Nazirs (see nāẓir)—was presided over by Fayzulla Xoʻjayev.
The Bukharan People's Soviet Republic existed from 1920 to 1924 when the city was integrated into the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic.
During Enver Pasha's campaign in 1922, majority of Bukhara temporarily fell into the hand of the Basmachis.
Fitzroy Maclean, then a young diplomat in the British Embassy in Moscow, made a surreptitious visit to Bokhara in 1938, sight-seeing and sleeping in parks. In his memoir Eastern Approaches, he judged it an "enchanted city" with buildings that rivalled "the finest architecture of the Italian Renaissance". In the latter half of the 20th century, the war in Afghanistan and civil war in Tajikistan brought Dari- and Tajik-speaking refugees into Bukhara and Samarkand. After integrating themselves into the local Tajik population, these cities face a movement for annexation into Tajikistan with which the cities have no common border.
Landmarks
Architectural complexes
- Po-i-Kalyan Complex. The title Po-i Kalan or Poi Kalân (Persian: پای کلان 'Grand Foundation') belongs to the architectural complex located at the base of the great minaret Kalân.
- Kalyan minaret. More properly, Minâra-i Kalân (Persian/Tajik for 'Grand Minaret'). Also known as the Tower of Death, as according to legend it is the site where criminals were executed by being thrown off the top for centuries. The minaret is the most famed part of the ensemble, and dominates over historical center of the city. The role of the minaret is largely for traditional and decorative purposes—its dimension exceeds the bounds of the main function of the minaret, which is to provide a vantage point from which the muezzin can call out people to prayer. For this purpose it was enough to ascend to a roof of a mosque. This practice was common in initial years of Islam. The word minaret derives from the Arabic word منارة manāra ('lighthouse', or more literally 'a place where something burns'). The minarets of the region were possible adaptations of "fire-towers" or lighthouses of previous Zoroastrian eras. The architect, whose name was simply Bako, designed the minaret in the form of a circular-pillar brick tower, narrowing upwards. The diameter of the base is 9 meters (30 feet), while at the top it is 6 m (20 ft). The tower is 45.6 m (150 ft) high, and can be seen from vast distances over the flat plains of Central Asia. There is a brick spiral staircase that twists up inside around the pillar, leading to the landing in sixteen-arched rotunda and skylight, upon which is based a magnificently designed stalactite cornice (or "sharif").
- Kalân Mosque (Masjid-i Kalân), arguably completed in 1514, is equal to the Bibi-Khanym Mosque in Samarkand in size. The mosque is able to accommodate twelve thousand people. Although Kalyan Mosque and Bibi-Khanym Mosque of Samarkand are of the same type of building, they are different in terms of art of building. Two hundred and eighty-eight monumental pylons serve as a support for the multi-domed roofing of the galleries encircling the courtyard of Kalyan Mosque. The longitudinal axis of the courtyard ends up with a portal to the main chamber (maksura) with a cruciform hall, topped with a massive blue cupola on a mosaic drum. The edifice keeps many architectural curiosities, for example, a hole in one of domes. Through this hole one can see foundation of Kalyan Minaret. Then moving back step by step, one can count all belts of brickwork of the minaret to the rotunda.
- Mir-i Arab Madrassah (1535–1536). The construction of Mir-i-Arab Madrasah (Miri Arab Madrasah) is ascribed to Sheikh Abdullah Yamani of Yemen—called Mir-i-Arab—the spiritual mentor of Ubaidullah Khan and his son Abdul-Aziz Khan. Ubaidullah-khan waged permanent successful war with Iran. At least three times his troops seized Herat. Each of such plundering raids on Iran was accompanied by capture of great many captives. They say that Ubaidullah-khan had invested money gained from redemption of more than three thousand Persian captives into construction of Mir-i-Arab Madrasah. Ubaidullah-khan was very religious. He had been nurtured in high respect for Islam in the spirit of Sufism. His father named him in honor of prominent sheikh of the 15th century Ubaidullah al-Ahrar (1404–1490), by origin from Tashkent Region. By the 1530s, when sovereigns erected splendid mausoleums for themselves and for their relatives, was over. Khans of Shaibanid dynasty were standard-bearers of Koran traditions. The significance of religion was so great that even such famed khan as Ubaidullah was conveyed to earth close by his mentor in his madrasah. In the middle of the vault (gurhana) in Mir-i-Arab Madrasah is situated the wooden tomb of Ubaidullah-khan. At his head is wrapped in the moulds his mentor, Mir-i-Arab. Muhammad Kasim, mudarris (a senior teacher) of the madrasah (died in 1047 hijra) is also interred near by here. The portal of Miri Arab Madrasah is situated on one axis with the portal of the Kalyan Mosque. However, because of some lowering of the square to the east it was necessary to raise a little an edifice of the madrasah on a platform.
- Lab-i Hauz Complex (or Lab-e hauz, Persian: لب حوض, meaning by the pond) Ensemble (1568–1622) is the name of the area surrounding one of the few remaining hauz, or pond, in the city of Bukhara. Several such ponds existed in Bukhara prior to Soviet rule. The ponds acted as the city's principal source of water, but were also notorious for spreading disease, and thus were mostly filled in during the 1920s and 1930s by the Soviets. The Lab-i Hauz survived owing to its role as the centerpiece of an architectural ensemble dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries. The Lab-i Hauz ensemble consists of the 16th-century Kukeldash Madrasah, the largest in the city, along the north side of the pond. On the eastern and western sides of the pond are a 17th-century lodging-house for itinerant Sufis, and a 17th-century madrasah.
- Bahoutdin Architectural Complex is a necropolis commemorating Shaykh Baha-ud-Din or Bohoutdin, the founder of Naqshbandi order. The complex includes the dahma (gravestone) of Bahoutdin, Khakim Kushbegi mosque, Muzaffarkan mosque, and Abdul-Lazizkhan khanqah. The site is listed on the UNESCO World Heritage Site tentative list on 18 January 2008.
Ark and Registan
The Ark of Bukhara is a massive fortress in the city of Bukhara.