Mausoleum of Yunus Khan

The mausoleum of Yunus Khan stands next to the tomb of Sheikh Khovendi at-Tahur and belongs to the Sheikhantaur complex; it now sits inside the grounds of the Islamic University.

His sons built it at the end of the fifteenth century as a khanaka, a type unusual in Uzbekistan and normally associated with dervishes and the Sufi tradition. The building is large and two-storeyed, with a revak colonnade across the front. The plan is T-shaped, closer to Iranian mausoleums: a central cruciform hall runs into a fine octagonal niche, flanked by two rows of cells under shield-shaped domes. The outer dome sits on a cylindrical drum, and the vault itself is assembled from delicately intersecting pendentives and arches. The hall can be entered from three sides. Arabic script and girikh ornament cover the façades, while the interior is plain: stone columns with traces of muqarnas, and the panjara screens of the main front. The carved door is not original — it was moved here from a demolished neighbourhood mosque in the 1930s.

The earthquake of 1571 destroyed the upper parts, rebuilt fourteen years later; the dome was reconstructed in 1970, but no drawings survived and the original form could not be recovered.

Yunus Khan was born in 1416, lost his father at thirteen and spent more than twenty years in exile — in Herat, then in Yazd, where he was well educated under the historian Sharafuddin Ali Yazdi, author of the Zafar-nameh. He studied literature, theology, Arabic and Persian, wrote verse and sang to his own accompaniment. At forty he returned home and became khan of the Moghul ulus, and his friendship with Khoja Ahrar helped him add Tashkent to his lands. He ruled until sixty-nine, when a stroke left him paralysed.

Yunus Khan descended from Genghis Khan and was kin to the Timurids; his grandson Zahiriddin Babur, son of his daughter Mihr Nigar, founded the Mughal empire and wrote the Baburnama. Whenever Babur was in Tashkent he visited his grandfather's grave.

The building keeps its puzzles: craftsmen once set a chang into the leaves of the hall doors so that they sounded, and no burial has ever been found in the hall itself.