Bolo-Hauz Complex

Every large Eastern city had a Registan, its central square. Bukhara's stood opposite the Ark fortress: mosques, palaces, trade halls, the chancellery, a hospital. Of all that, essentially one complex survives — Bolo-Hauz.

Work began in the eighteenth century on the initiative of Emir Shahmurad. The ruler wanted to show his people that he was a man like any other, and set about a public mosque he meant to attend himself for Friday prayers.

The name translates as the children's pool. Water was never easy in Central Asia, so hauz — artificial pools — were dug, and water carriers took the water in leather skins to the residential quarters and bazaars, for a fee of course. Bolo-Hauz served as one such source until the twentieth century, when the Soviet authorities drained it: standing water spread disease, and people went on drawing it from habit.

The mosque was built for a ruler's prayers and looks the part. Its chief ornament is the twenty wooden columns that carry the ceiling, carved along their whole length. Locally it is called the mosque of forty columns: nobody has miscounted — another twenty were reflected in the water of the pool. The building is over three centuries old, but the mosque works, and people come to pray here daily.

A minaret stands beside it, put up slightly later — small but finely done. It has a story of its own: for a long time it leaned noticeably and kept leaning, which earned it comparisons with the tower at Pisa. The last restoration reinforced the base, and it now stands straight.