Sultan Saodat Ensemble

Sultan Saodat means, in Arabic, the sovereignty of the sayyids. Sayyids are held to be direct descendants of the Prophet Muhammad; the local line was founded by Hasan al-Emir, of the fifth generation from Imam Husayn, the Prophet's grandson. Their family necropolis stands three kilometres from Termez, on the bank of the Surkhandarya.

The first mausoleum of the ensemble was a caliph's tomb, raised in the mid-1230s. At the same time, or slightly later, the people of Old Termez — destroyed by the Mongols — built a town here, called in the sources Madinat ar-Rijal, the city of learned men.

The ensemble runs seventy metres from west to east; barely half its buildings survive. The original tomb consists of two domed chambers — a mausoleum and a mosque — joined by a vaulted iwan. Two entrances stand in the side walls: from the north into the mausoleum, from the south into the mosque.

The main front is remarkable for how much is made from little: the whole decoration is laid in plain fired brick — herringbone, geometric figures, buds. The mausoleum walls, worked in bow shapes, are cut with flat niches along their length. Plain rectangular gravestones fill the interior today.

The mosque also became a burial place, which is why the scholarly literature sometimes calls it a mausoleum by mistake. It is noticeably plainer: the walls are faced simply in courses of paired brick, and only the mihrab carries the bow motif. Engraved lines from the Qur'an were found inside.

The ensemble has been restored more than once. The first time was in the fourteenth or fifteenth century: the building was returned to its earlier form, the decoration brought into the style of the day, and an inscription cut that is valuable as one of the earliest written records of the Termez sayyid line.