Jarkurgan Minaret

The Jarkurgan minaret stands sixty kilometres from Termez, in the village of Minor. It is the only historic monument in these parts that still bears the name of its maker — Ali ibn Muhammad of Serakhs.

Built in 1108–09, it originally rose about forty metres; over time it has leaned some two degrees off vertical. Scholars disagree on whether it was left unfinished or destroyed later.

The monument adjoined a mosque whose ruins were found in 1879. It is held, though, that the minaret stood on its own: there are no traces of a join. In hard times the top of the minaret and the remains of the mosque were probably taken apart by local people for building material.

What makes it unique in Central Asian architecture is the division of the shaft by vertical decorative flutes in a herringbone pattern, as in the tower mausoleums of India and Khorasan. They are made of fired brick, and the effect is at once plain and elegant. The foundation too is fired brick set in lime mortar.

Sixteen half-columns pressed close together stand on an eight-sided plinth, and in the surviving upper part a band of epigraphic ornament binds them — the name and titles of Emir Sultan Sanjar, at whose command the minaret was built. The stair entrance, now blocked, was on the south-west side.

It now stands 21.6 metres high and 5.4 across — and for all it has lost, it reads as a finished thing.