Khiva: the walled city that time forgot

There is something unsettling about Khiva’s perfection. The inner walled city — Ichan Kala — contains more than sixty historic monuments crammed into less than thirty hectares, and everything has been restored, everything is visible, everything is labelled. Arriving at dawn and walking its packed-earth streets without encountering anyone but the occasional drowsy cat, the feeling is not of having stepped into the past: it is of standing inside an extraordinarily well-built film set.

That effect is not accidental. It is the specific nature of Khiva, and understanding it is the key to appreciating what the city has that is genuinely unique — and accepting what it lacks.

What Ichan Kala holds

The Samarkand we know today was largely reconstructed during the Soviet period. Bukhara is a living city where local residents share their daily lives with the historic fabric: there are shops, homes, children playing beside medieval mosques. Khiva is something else entirely. Ichan Kala was declared a museum-city in the 1970s, the resident population was progressively relocated or not replaced, and the walled precinct became what it is now: a monumental ensemble of formal coherence unmatched anywhere in Central Asia.

The Kalta Minor minaret is the first thing that catches the eye, though the reason it carries that name — “short minaret” — is that it was never finished. Muhammad Amin Khan ordered its construction in 1851 with the ambition of making it the tallest minaret in the world: thirty metres at the base, decorated with turquoise tiles that shift in tone through the day. The khan died before it was completed and nobody took up the project again. What remained is one of the widest minarets in Central Asia, its truncated profile making it instantly recognisable in any photograph.

Two minarets, two eras

A short distance from the Kalta Minor stands the Islam Khoja minaret, and the comparison between the two is a compressed history lesson. Built in 1910 by the grand vizier Islam Khoja — who attempted to modernise the Khanate of Khiva under Russian influence — this minaret rises fifty-seven metres and has a slender profile that blends classical Central Asian proportions with a new decorative restraint, more austere, reflecting contact with the Russian and European world.

Islam Khoja also built Khiva’s first secular school, a hospital and a postal service. He was assassinated in 1913, probably at the khan’s instigation, who viewed his reforms with deep suspicion. The minaret bearing his name is what remains of an interrupted modernisation. The two minarets — the truncated one of the khan who dreamed too large, the slender one of the vizier who tried to change too fast — tell the story of the Khanate of Khiva’s decline better than any book.

The Tash-Hauli palace and the slave market

The Tash-Hauli palace — “stone courtyard” — took eleven years to build, between 1832 and 1841, and its builder had the architect executed who initially told him the work would take more than two years. The result is a complex of harem quarters, reception halls and official residences that displays Khiva’s carved wooden latticework and blue-and-white tiles in their most elaborate domestic form.

What the tourist signs inside Ichan Kala do not advertise is that Khiva was, until the late nineteenth century, one of the most active slave-trading centres in Central Asia. Caravans arriving from the north brought Persian, Russian and Kazakh prisoners to be sold in the city’s market. By the mid-nineteenth century, between thirty and forty thousand enslaved people lived within the khanate. It was the abolition of slavery, imposed by the Russian Empire following the conquest of 1873, that ended this trade. The history of Khiva is not only Timurid architecture: it is also the history of a political power that lasted into the modern era and had a face that museum restoration tends to smooth over.

Getting there, timing the visit

Khiva is not on the way to anything, and that is part of its appeal. The most convenient option from Tashkent is the flight to Urgench — one hour — followed by a thirty-minute taxi ride to the walled city. There is also an overnight train from Tashkent covering the 1,100 kilometres in about twelve hours: the four-berth compartment carriages (kupé) are perfectly adequate, the price barely reaches twenty dollars, and waking in the outskirts of Urgench as the sun rises over the flat Khorezm landscape is an experience in itself.

The ideal seasons are May and September. In July and August, the heat of the Karakum Desert makes itself felt seriously — over 40°C is common — and Ichan Kala, with its narrow streets and mud surfaces that absorb the heat, becomes a considerable physical effort. In October the weather is perfect, tourist groups thin out noticeably and the autumn light gives the tiles a warmth that summer’s harsh sun flattens.

The problem with perfection

There is something that every traveller who has seen all three of Uzbekistan’s main cities ends up saying about Khiva: it is the most beautiful and the least alive. Samarkand has half a million inhabitants and genuine urban energy. Bukhara has a living medina where people shop, live and pray among the monuments. Khiva inside the walls is, by evening, almost an empty stage set: the tourists have gone, the vendors have closed up, and the few remaining residents are not enough to animate a space of that scale.

But the morning is different. If you stay inside Ichan Kala — there are several guesthouses in historic buildings, at reasonable prices — and step out at seven in the morning before the first buses arrive from Urgench, you have an hour or two in which the city is entirely yours. The light comes in low across the minarets, the silence is absolute, and Khorezmian architecture — with its carved wooden portals, its adobe walls, its scale more intimate than Samarkand’s — shows what it truly is: not a film set, but the finest surviving example of what a Central Asian city looked like two centuries ago.

That is worth the detour.

The complete Far Guides Uzbekistan guide includes detailed Silk Road routes, interactive maps and all the practical information you need to plan your independent trip.