Said Alauddin Mausoleum

The mausoleum of Said Alauddin is one of the oldest monuments of the inner city, and it has come down to us much rebuilt. What it originally looked like, and exactly when it was built, cannot be said.

What is known is that the sheikh Said Alauddin, a Sufi of the Naqshbandi order, died in 1303, if the gravestone inscription is to be believed. Building the mausoleum is linked to Amir Kulyal, which places its start in the second half of the fourteenth century.

It was rebuilt more than once. In the first half of the nineteenth century, on Allakuli Khan's orders, a square ziyarat-khona — the main room for worshippers — was added on the west, changing the entrance. Towards the end of the century the respected Khivan khan Said Muhammad was buried here; a gravestone was made specially, joining two graves in one: a pedestal carrying two sagans, the pointed crowns of Muslim tombs.

The architecture, unremarkable as it looks, is interesting precisely for the contrast. Domes, walls and stepped squinches are laid in clay brick and left entirely undecorated. The gravestones stand out all the more, faced in coloured majolica in the traditional Khorezmian manner of the fourteenth century — though they were in fact decorated only in the 1860s.