Mausoleum "Chashma-Ayub" («Istochnik Iova», 12th–16th centuries)

Chashma-Ayub — the spring of Job — stands in Samanid Park, near the Samanid mausoleum and the remains of the old city wall. It is a mausoleum and a sacred spring at once, named for the saint Ayub, the biblical prophet Job.

The legend says that before Bukhara existed, people here were dying of thirst. Seeing Job passing through, they asked for help; he struck the ground with his staff and a well of cool, clear water opened at once. The spring's healing power is still credited here.

The building is drawn out as a long prism directly over the spring. Its domes vary in shape, and over the main chamber with the spring rises a double dome capped by a cone like a tent — an unfamiliar silhouette for Bukhara, and easy to pick out in the city's skyline. Inside are small darkened halls under the vaults, cool and quiet.

The mausoleum was built in the twelfth century under the Karakhanids. Two hundred years later Amir Timur brought masters from Khorezm and ordered the work continued — hence the Khorezmian features. It was rebuilt more than once between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. There are several burials; the earliest is the grave of the theologian and hadith scholar Khoja Hofiz Gunjori, interred here in 1022.

The mausoleum now houses a Water Museum and a carpet display. The exhibition shows how the Bukhara region was supplied with water across the centuries: ceramic water pipes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, chased copper vessels, leather water skins of the eighteenth to twentieth. You can taste the spring water — which is what many come for.