Memorial complex "Pahlavon Mahmud" (13th–14th centuries)

Almost every people has its strongmen in its epics; in Central Asia they are called pahlavans. Pahlavan Mahmud is the best known of the Khorezmian ones.

By trade he was a furrier, dressing hides, and that was his living. By vocation he was a wrestler, a poet and a philosopher. Fame came in his lifetime and reached far beyond Khiva. By legend he lost no bout as a wrestler; the one he did concede he threw deliberately, having learned that defeat would cost his opponent his life. Iranian professional wrestlers still say a prayer to Pahlavan Mahmud before a match.

He died, by tradition, in 1322 or 1325 and was buried in the yard of his own workshop. The people of Khiva came to regard him as the city's patron, and in 1701 a mausoleum was raised over the grave. The place quickly became sacred, a whole complex grew around it, and the gravestone and the mausoleum were finished in the traditional blue-and-white majolica used for khans' tombs. An eastern gallery was added in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Khans then began to be buried here too: Muhammad Rahim Khan I, Abdulghazi Khan, Elbars II and members of their families. So a wrestler's tomb became the burial place of the Khivan khans.

At the end of the nineteenth century a mosque, a madrasah and four karikhanas — charitable foundations — were built in the complex. Pilgrims were given hujra cells and an oshkhona, a refectory with a kitchen. The karikhana sheltered blind people, of whom there were many in Khorezm because of the constant sand-bearing winds.

In the early twentieth century a two-storey building went up in front of the tomb; one of its rooms became the richly decorated burial chamber of Isfandiyar Khan.