Khodja Zainutdin Complex (16th c.)

This sixteenth-century complex is hidden inside a residential quarter at the heart of Bukhara — which is part of its effect: an ordinary mahalla street, and then suddenly a khanaka with paintwork under the dome.

The building is called a mosque-khanaka: the central domed hall served Sufis for ceremonies with chamber singing to instrumental accompaniment. Combining a mosque with a khanaka was common in the late medieval period and stood for the merging of classical Islam with the Sufi tradition.

The main hall is generously finished. A patterned mosaic dado runs below, above it wall panels painted in plant pigments with blues predominating; the upper walls, the dome and the pendentives are painted too.

The most venerated thing here is the mazar of Khodja Zaynutdin, in the western niche of the mosque. It is a gravestone over which two poles once stood. The plainness is deliberate: by canon even rulers were not buried in lavish mausoleums, a simple mazar in a courtyard with a portal entrance and a brick wall being preferred. Inside the yard stood either a sagan — an arched sarcophagus — or a dakhma, a rectangular stone-faced platform. Mausoleums were built mainly under the Timurids; the Shaybanids forbade them, and they returned only at the end of the seventeenth and start of the eighteenth century.

Near the mosque is Bukhara's oldest hauz. The pool walls were faced in marble, and at the stepped descent to the water stood a carved marble spout in the form of an open dragon's mouth, worked with ornament and inscriptions.

The khanaka has been in turn a shelter for wandering dervishes, a gathering place for Sufis, a neighbourhood mosque and the burial place of a revered sheikh. The quiet is still what makes people turn off the tourist routes for it.