Sheybani Khan Bridge (on the Zarafshan River, 1502)

Travelling by train from Tashkent to Samarkand, at the crossing of the Zarafshan you can see on the left a huge brick arch — the ruins of an old bridge. At sunset it looks particularly imposing.

Popular belief attributes it to Tamerlane, but the bridge was in fact built by the Uzbek khan Shaybani. The medieval historian and poet Kamaliddin Binai records it: in 1502 Shaybani Khan was returning with his army from Bukhara to Samarkand and, reaching the Kuhak river, found the old bridge destroyed. The crossing proved very hard, and the khan ordered a new and solid bridge built here. The work was given to Samarkand's best architects.

The whole army built it. The river was dammed to a plan drawn up in advance, and construction took about a month: the bridge was finished on 3 November 1502. From the width of the river at this point the bridge was probably over two hundred metres long, and from the size of the surviving arch it evidently had seven.

When the bridge went out of use and began to fall is not known. One arch remains, standing away from the tourist routes: a dirt road leads to it, and evening is the time to go.