Karatepa Complex (2nd–4th century)

Kara-Tepa — the black hills — was a centre of Buddhist culture in the second to fourth centuries AD. The complex stands on three sandy hills to the north-west of the Old Termez site and covers about seven hectares.

There were once dozens of monasteries and temples here of an unusual kind, part surface and part cave: some structures were cut into the slopes and built of mud brick and pakhsa, others dug straight into the Quaternary sandstone.

As in any Buddhist centre there are many stupas — dome-shaped structures for relics, with no way inside. Stone is scarce in Central Asia, so the stupas were built of clay. Even so, there was a stone Buddha sculpture at Kara-Tepa: the evidence for it has been found.

Under the Kushan kingdom, in the first to third centuries, the cult centre was called Khadeva-ka vihara, the royal monastery; this was the height of Buddhism in these parts. In the fifth century the caves of Kara-Tepa were used for burials, and in the ninth to twelfth centuries Sufi hermits settled in them — a rare case of one site serving two traditions in turn.

The site was studied jointly by the Japanese archaeologist Kato Kyuzo, the director of Uzbekistan's Institute of Archaeology Sh. Pidaev, and the institute's associate professor T. Annaev. Their work did much to explain how Buddhism spread through the region and what part the Termez monks played in it; Kato Kyuzo was awarded the Order of Dustlik.