Bukhara, Uzbekistan: Silk Road Travel Guide | Palace Tours

Bukhara sits in the Zeravshan oasis of southwestern Uzbekistan, where a thin green ribbon of irrigated land holds back the Kyzylkum Desert on every side. It is roughly 280 kilometres west of Samarkand and some 580 kilometres from the capital, Tashkent, and it has been inhabited for well over two thousand years. Where Samarkand overwhelms with scale and colour, Bukhara works quietly: a low, sand-coloured town of brick domes, wooden colonnades and shaded pools, most of it still arranged along the lanes merchants used when the Silk Road ran through the front door.

The city was the capital of the Samanid Empire in the ninth and tenth centuries, and for centuries afterwards the seat of the Khanate and then the Emirate of Bukhara. It earned the title Bukhoro-i-sharif, “Bukhara the Noble”, as a centre of Islamic scholarship, and at its height supported more than a hundred madrasahs. Its historic centre has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1993, and it remains one of the most complete medieval towns in Central Asia — not a reconstruction, but a living quarter where families still live behind the monument walls. For Palace Tours guests, Bukhara is one of the great set pieces of a Golden Eagle luxury train journey across the Silk Road, reached in the comfort of a private cabin rather than after days on the road.

What to see in Bukhara

• Po-i-Kalyan complex — The monumental heart of the old city, where the Kalyan Mosque and the Mir-i-Arab Madrasah face each other across a paved square. The madrasah is still a working seminary, so its inner courtyard is generally closed to visitors, but the portal alone is worth the walk.
• Kalyan Minaret — A 45-metre baked-brick tower finished in the twelfth century under Arslan Khan, banded with fourteen different geometric patterns. It reportedly so impressed Genghis Khan that he spared it when the rest of the city fell.
• The Ark Fortress — A vast mud-brick citadel raised on its own artificial mound, occupied in some form since the fifth century and the residence of the emirs until 1920. Inside are the coronation court, the mosque, and small museums covering the emirate’s last years.
• Samanid Mausoleum — Small, cubic and quietly astonishing. Built for the Samanid dynasty around the tenth century, it is among the oldest surviving Islamic monuments in Central Asia, and its walls are woven entirely from unglazed baked brick laid in shifting basketwork patterns that change with the sun.
• Lyabi-Hauz — A seventeenth-century plaza built around a stone-rimmed pool shaded by ancient plane trees, flanked by the Kukeldash Madrasah and the Nadir Divan-Begi complex. It is the town’s living room: chaikhanas, storks on the rooftops, and locals playing chess in the late afternoon.
• The trading domes — Toki Zargaron, Toki Telpak Furushon and Toki Sarrafon are domed crossroads bazaars where jewellers, hatmakers and money-changers once had their own covered quarters. They are still full of stalls, and still the best place to lose an hour.
• Bolo Hauz Mosque — The emir’s own Friday mosque, dating from the early eighteenth century, with a veranda of twenty slender carved wooden columns that double themselves in the reflecting pool below.
• Chor Minor — A curious little gatehouse of a vanished madrasah, with four squat towers under turquoise domes, each detailed differently. It is tucked into a residential lane and easy to miss.
• Sitorai Mohi Xosa — The last emir’s summer palace on the town’s edge, a fusion of Russian imperial and Bukharan design, with peacocks in the garden and a hall of mirrored white plasterwork.

What to eat in Bukhara

Uzbek cooking is generous and slow, and Bukhara has its own dialect of it. Plov (osh) is the centrepiece — rice cooked with lamb, carrot and onion in a wide cast-iron kazan, the Bukharan version darker and often sweetened with raisins or chickpeas. Alongside it you will meet shurpa, a clear lamb-and-vegetable broth; lagman, hand-pulled noodles in a spiced sauce; manti, large steamed dumplings served with sour cream; and samsa, flaky pastries of lamb, onion and cumin slapped onto the wall of a tandyr oven. Skewers of shashlik are grilled everywhere in the old town after dark.

Bread here is serious. Bukharan non is round, stamped in the centre with a decorative chekich and baked against the tandyr wall, and it appears at every meal. The city’s long-established Bukharan Jewish community contributed dishes such as bakhsh, a herb-green rice pilaf cooked with beef and coriander. Finish with dried apricots and melon, walnut halva, navat crystallised sugar, and endless pots of green tea — the default gesture of hospitality in every chaikhana.

Shopping and crafts

Bukhara is the traditional home of zarduzi, gold-thread embroidery once reserved for the emir’s court and still worked on velvet robes, slippers and caps. Look also for suzani — large hand-embroidered cotton hangings — silk ikat cloth in its blurred rainbow patterns, carpets, engraved copperware, and the town’s famous hand-forged scissors shaped like long-billed storks, made by a handful of families who will happily demonstrate the whole process at the forge.

Best time to visit

Spring and autumn are the clear winners. April to early June brings warm days, roses in the courtyards and the Silk and Spices festival; September and October are dry and golden, with the melon and grape harvest at its peak. High summer routinely pushes past 40°C with almost no shade in the desert around the city, while winter is genuinely cold and can drop below freezing, though the monuments look striking under a dusting of snow and crowds are minimal.

Good to know

• The old town is compact and best walked — most of the major monuments sit within a twenty-minute stroll of Lyabi-Hauz, on uneven brick and stone, so bring comfortable shoes.
• Dress modestly at mosques and madrasahs: covered shoulders and knees, and a scarf for women at active places of worship. Small entrance and photography fees are common and are usually cash only.
• The currency is the Uzbek som. Card acceptance has improved in hotels and larger restaurants, but bazaars, taxis and craft workshops run on cash.
• Bargaining in the trading domes is expected and good-humoured; start well below the asking price and settle somewhere near the middle.
• Summer heat is the single biggest practical constraint — plan sightseeing early and late, and keep water with you.

Bukhara appears on Palace Tours’ Golden Eagle luxury train itineraries across Central Asia, where the train serves as your hotel between the great Silk Road cities. To talk through options, call us in the US or Canada on 1-800-724-5120, internationally on +1-609-580-1372, or message us on WhatsApp at +1-786-454-3555.