The "Kunya-Ark" fortress (17th–19th centuries)

Khiva recently marked two and a half thousand years, and in 1990 it was not a single monument that went onto the UNESCO list but the whole of Ichan-Kala together with the Dishan-Kala suburb. The heart of the inner town was and remains the Kunya-Ark fortress.

Kunya-Ark — the old fortress — is a ruler's citadel of the kind every large city had. Everything needed for the khan, his family, his troops and his officials was here: from the end of the eighteenth century it was a guarded town within a town, behind double battlemented clay walls, its own and those of Ichan-Kala, up to ten metres high and five to six thick.

Building began in 1686–88, laid out by Khudaidad Khan, son of Anusha Khan and the last but one of the Shaybanids in the Khanate of Khiva. Work went on into the second half of the nineteenth century, when much was rebuilt after the ruin left by the Iranian invasion of the eighteenth. Little of the khans' residence survives: the east gate with its guard room, the kurinishkhana or audience hall, the Ak-Sheikh-Bobo bastion, the winter and summer mosques and the harem.

A square lies before the fortress, used for drills and parades, and for public executions. A zindan — a prison — adjoined the east wall; its interior has been recreated, with figures showing how prisoners were kept. To the left of the gates run rooms that served as stables, workshops, stores and guardrooms. A long narrow corridor leads inward and links the yards. The first, by the entrance, was for envoys awaiting an audience; the second held the fortress guns; the third was where the khan's council met; beyond it lies the largest yard, the kurinishkhana, the place of official receptions and part of the vanished palace.

The first kurinishkhana building of the 1680s was destroyed by the Iranians; the present one was raised by Iltuzar Khan in 1804–06. It has an open court, an iwan, a throne hall and side rooms on the west, which held the treasury, the archive and a library of rare manuscripts. The iwan rests on two carved columns whose stone bases bear verses by the poet and historian Ogahi. In the throne hall, under a decorative half-dome, stood a wooden throne sheathed in engraved silver plates with lines from the Qur'an; it is now in the Kremlin Armoury in Moscow. Envoys of the nomadic tribes were received, as a mark of respect, in a yurt set on a round dais in the middle of the yard.

A door in the corner opposite the entrance leads to the harem, added in the second half of the nineteenth century under Muhammad Rahim Khan, and to the Ak-Sheikh-Bobo hill with its unusual clay bastion: the platform on top gives the best view over old Khiva.