Lyabi-Hauz Ensemble

Lyabi-Hauz is the most lived-in spot in old Bukhara: people come to sit by the water under the mulberry trees and go nowhere in a hurry. The square lies in the south-eastern part of the shahristan — the area inside the city walls but outside the citadel — beside the main trading street.

The ensemble took shape in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries around a large artificial pool: forty-two metres long, thirty-six wide and five deep. Around it stand the khanaka and madrasah of Nadir Divan-begi (1622), with the Kukeldash madrasah (1568) a little to one side. The name translates literally as the bank of the pool. Water carriers came down the stone steps here to draw water for the city. In the Soviet period Bukhara's ponds were drained wholesale as breeding grounds for disease; this is one of the few that survived.

It exists because the vizier Nadir Divan-begi ordered a pool dug between the Kukeldash madrasah, the khanaka and his own madrasah, to complete the picture he had in mind. A well-known story attaches to it. An elderly Jewish widow's house stood on the site, and she would not sell. The vizier brought her before the emir, but Imam Quli Khan referred the matter to a college of muftis, who ruled that the yard could not be taken by force: Jews held the same rights as Muslims. The vizier then ran the channel for his future pool directly under the walls of the house, and the water began to undermine the foundations. The widow came to him herself — but took no money, asking instead for a plot of land and permission to build a synagogue. Divan-begi agreed and gave her ground in the quarter still called the Jewish one. So the great pool and Bukhara's first synagogue came into being. The pool's unofficial name has stuck: Hauz-i Bazur, built by coercion.

In medieval times the square was a place of trade: the main commercial street ran alongside, and closely built Bukhara had few open spaces. Trade has given way to teahouses, but the role is unchanged — this is where people meet.