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Now a souvenir shop, Char Minar was originally the gatehouse of a madrasa (Islamic school) built in 1807 that is now long-gone. (A stubby Char Minar is featured on the cover of the 2014 edition of the Lonely Planet Central Asia guidebook.)

By 500 BCE the settlements at the Bukhara oasis had grown enough that a walled city was founded. Bukhara prospered as a trading center, especially benefitting from its location along the Silk Road. Christianity may have been the official religion of the ruling caste in the late-7th/early-8th centuries as more coins with crosses have been found in Bukhara than anywhere else in Central Asia. However, after the Arabs finally conquered Bukhara in 751, Islam gradually became the dominant religion. In 892 the Samanids (a Sunni Persian empire) moved their capital from Samarkand to Bukhara which then grew to become the intellectual center of the Islamic world with the largest population by far of any city in Central Asia and rivaling Baghdad in its glory. The Samanid Empire was toppled in 999. In 1220 the city was leveled by the Mongols led by Genghis Khan but managed to slowly recover. In 1868 the Emirate of Bukhara was forced to become a protectorate of the Russian Empire. After the attack of the Red Army of the Bolsheviks in 1920, the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic was formed with the bulk of it then integrated into the Uzbek SSR in 1925 (smaller portions going to present-day Tajikistan and Turkmenistan). In August 1991 Uzbekistan declared its independence.

The Historic Centre of Bukhara became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993.

[The term ‘Silk Road’ was coined in 1877 by German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen The Silk Road contributed not only to the exchange of goods and technologies, but also to the mutual enrichment of cultures and traditions of different peoples. Direct maritime trade between Europe and the Far East ultimately supplanted the overland route.]

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