Page 36 - Seniorstoday May 2024 Issue

and nobles, including a number of Timur’s blue dome rising far above the delicate
relatives. The site is a dazzling avenue of spring green.” She found it “Amazing,
blue tombs and various mausoleums and considering that he lived as far back as the
has some of the richest tilework in the fourteenth century, that so much remains
Muslim world. The exquisite majolica and of those architectural adornments added
terracotta work, with minuscule amount
of space between the tiles was of such
exceptional quality that it required almost
no restoration. The legend goes that the
Prophet Muhammad’s cousin, Kusam ibn
Abbas, was buried here. It is a place so
holy that a visit here is regarded by some
as equivalent to a pilgrimage to Mecca. A
legend that can keep one awake at nights,
says, there is a headless body roaming the
corridors every night holding his severed
head in his hands!
Samarkand was the centre of
Tamerlane’s empire, built on his own
giant scale. Some two kilometres from the
Registan is the Gur-e Amir mausoleum,
where his body lies beneath a solid block
of green jade surrounded by statues and
arches that light up beautifully at night. Shahi Zinda Mausoleum
The Gur -e -Amir Mausoleum is widely
considered a masterpiece of Central Asian
medieval architecture. ‘Gur-e-Amir’
translates as ‘tomb of the king’ – it holds
headstones of Timur’s sons and grandsons.
Guides here whisper about the curse
of Tamerlane. Legend has it that when
Stalin ordered the grave to be opened, in
1941, archaeologists found an inscription
inside: “Whosoever disturbs my tomb
will unleash an invader more terrible
than I”. Three days later, Hitler ordered
the invasion of the Soviet Union. Stalin
ordered the body to be reinterred with full
Islamic ritual the following year. Agatha
Christie was spellbound by the great
tiled buildings and wrote of Tamerlane’s
final resting place, the Gur-e-Amir: “I
can never forget the sight of that fluted

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