The Ark of Bukhara is a massive

fortress A fortification (also called a fort, fortress, fastness, or stronghold) is a military construction designed for the defense of territories in warfare, and is used to establish rule in a region during peacetime. The term is derived from L ...

located in the city of

Bukhara Bukhara ( ) is the List of cities in Uzbekistan, seventh-largest city in Uzbekistan by population, with 280,187 residents . It is the capital of Bukhara Region. People have inhabited the region around Bukhara for at least five millennia, and t ...

Uzbekistan , image_flag = Flag of Uzbekistan.svg , image_coat = Emblem of Uzbekistan.svg , symbol_type = Emblem of Uzbekistan, Emblem , national_anthem = "State Anthem of Uzbekistan, State Anthem of the Republ ...

, that was initially built and occupied around the 5th century AD. In addition to being a military structure, the Ark encompassed what was essentially a town that, during much of the fortress's history, was inhabited by the various royal courts that held sway over the region surrounding Bukhara. The Ark was used as a fortress until it fell to Russia in 1920. Currently, the Ark is a tourist attraction and houses museums covering its history. The museums and other restored areas include an archaeological museum, the throne room, the reception and coronation court, a local history museum, and the court mosque.

Description

The Ark is a large earthen fortification located in the northwestern part of contemporary Bukhara. In layout, it resembles a modified rectangle, a little elongated from the west to the east. The perimeter of the external walls is , the area enclosed being . The height of the walls varies from . The ceremonial entrance into the citadel is architecturally framed by two 18th-century towers. The upper parts of the towers are connected by a gallery, rooms, and terraces. A gradually rising ramp leads through a winch-raised portal and a covered long corridor to the mosque of Dzhuma. The covered corridor offers access to storerooms and prison cells. In the center of the Ark is located a large complex of buildings, one of the best-preserved being the mosque of Ul'dukhtaron, which is connected to legends of forty girls tortured and cast into a well.

Construction

Prince

Siyâvash Siyâvash (), also spelled Siyâvoš or Siavash (), is a major figure in the ''Shahnameh''. He is introduced by Ferdowsi as the son of Kay Kāvus, who reigns as Shah in the earliest days of Greater Iran for over a century. His name means "the o ...

is said to have built the Ark of Bukhara and eventually been buried there. After his death, the great citadel was put out of commission to mourn the prince. Three thousand years later, Budun Bukhar-Khudat restored the citadel. Many aspects of the design of the Ark of Bukhara were influenced by astrological elements. For example, the palace has seven stone pillars for the seven-star constellation

Ursa Major Ursa Major, also known as the Great Bear, is a constellation in the Northern Sky, whose associated mythology likely dates back into prehistory. Its Latin name means "greater (or larger) bear", referring to and contrasting it with nearby Ursa M ...

. The overall shape of the Ark was also influenced by the constellation. The foundations of the citadel were also influenced by the topography and tombs of the area. There are multiple different kinds of tombs that became a unique feature of Bukhara. Single tombs were located in city buildings and there were also special tombs reserved for important people. The layout of the city divided it into three sections: the citadel, the madina, and the suburbs. All important buildings such as the mosques and government offices were within the citadel. The mosques within the Ark of Bukhara were made of cotton, wood, clay, and both, raw and baked bricks. The baked bricks were used decoratively to line the mosques. The first mosque, Arslankhan, was built in 1119. Over its 349 year lifespan it was restored and expanded by the rulers, Kohandiz and Sharhristan. The rulers, amirs, and generals all lived inside the walls of the Ark of Bukhara. Outside of the ark were the suburbs where many villages were located. Eventually, the Canpirak wall was built to protect the people of those villages and provide more defense to the citadel.

Legendary origin

In legend, the creator of the Ark was the epic hero Siyavash, locally pronounced Siyavush. As a youth, he hid in the rich oasis country of Turan from his stepmother. Siyavush and the daughter of the local ruler of Afrasiyab fell in love. The girl's father agreed to permit them to marry provided that Siyavush would first build a palace in the area bounded by a bull skin, obviously intended as an impossible task. But Siyavush cut the bull skin into slender strips, connected the ends, and inside this boundary built the palace. Siyavush is a major figure in

Ferdowsi Abu'l-Qâsem Ferdowsi Tusi (also Firdawsi, ; 940 – 1019/1025) was a Persians, Persian poet and the author of ''Shahnameh'' ("Book of Kings"), which is one of the world's longest epic poetry, epic poems created by a single poet, and the gre ...

's epic, the ''

Shahnameh The ''Shahnameh'' (, ), also transliterated ''Shahnama'', is a long epic poem written by the Persian literature, Persian poet Ferdowsi between and 1010 CE and is the national epic of Greater Iran. Consisting of some 50,000 distichs or couple ...

''. (This story of the bull skin also mirrors the classical legend of

Dido Dido ( ; , ), also known as Elissa ( , ), was the legendary founder and first queen of the Phoenician city-state of Carthage (located in Tunisia), in 814 BC. In most accounts, she was the queen of the Phoenician city-state of Tyre (located ...

and the founding of

Carthage Carthage was an ancient city in Northern Africa, on the eastern side of the Lake of Tunis in what is now Tunisia. Carthage was one of the most important trading hubs of the Ancient Mediterranean and one of the most affluent cities of the classic ...

in North Africa, as recorded in antiquity.)

History

The Ark is built on the remains of earlier structures, which constitute a layer twenty meters deep under the base arch, the layers indicating that previous fortresses had been built and destroyed on the site. The first known reference to the Ark is contained in the "History of Bukhara" by

Narshakhi Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Jafar Narshakhi (or Narshaki) (ca. 899–959), a Sogdian scholar from the village of Narshak in the Bukhara oasis is the first known historian in Central Asia. His unique ''History of Bukhara'' (''Tarikh-i Bukhara'') was wr ...

(899–960). Abubakr wrote " Bindu, the ruler of Bukhara, built this fortress, but it soon was destroyed. Many times it was constructed, many times destroyed." Abubakr says that when the last ruler to rebuild asked counsel of his wise men, they advised him to construct the fortress around seven points, located in the same relation to each other as the stars of the constellation Ursa Major. Thus built, the fortress was never again destroyed. The age of the Ark has not been established accurately, but by 500 CE it was already the residence of local rulers. Here, in the fastness of the citadel, lived the emirs, their chief viziers, military leaders, and numerous servants. When the soldiers of

Genghis Khan Genghis Khan (born Temüjin; August 1227), also known as Chinggis Khan, was the founder and first khan (title), khan of the Mongol Empire. After spending most of his life uniting the Mongols, Mongol tribes, he launched Mongol invasions and ...

took Bukhara, the inhabitants of the city found refuge in the Ark, but the conquerors smashed the defenders and ransacked the fortress. In the Middle Ages the fortress was worked on by

Rudaki Rudaki (also spelled Rodaki; ; – 940/41) was a poet, singer, and musician who is regarded as the first major poet to write in New Persian. A court poet under the Samanids, he reportedly composed more than 180,000 verses, yet only a small p ...

Avicenna Ibn Sina ( – 22 June 1037), commonly known in the West as Avicenna ( ), was a preeminent philosopher and physician of the Muslim world, flourishing during the Islamic Golden Age, serving in the courts of various Iranian peoples, Iranian ...

Farabi thumbnail, 200px, Postage stamp of the USSR, issued on the 1100th anniversary of the birth of Al-Farabi (1975) Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Farabi (; – 14 December 950–12 January 951), known in the Latin West as Alpharabius, was an early Islamic ...

, and later

Omar Khayyám Ghiyāth al-Dīn Abū al-Fatḥ ʿUmar ibn Ibrāhīm Nīshābūrī (18 May 1048 – 4 December 1131) ( Persian: غیاث الدین ابوالفتح عمر بن ابراهیم خیام نیشابورﻯ), commonly known as Omar Khayyam (), was ...

. Here also was kept a great library, of which Avicenna wrote:

I found in this library such books, about which I had not known and which I had never before seen in my life. I read them, and I came to know each scientist and each science. Before me lay gates of inspiration into great depths of knowledge which I had not surmised to exist.

Most probably, the library was destroyed following one of the conquests of Bukhara. During the

Russian Civil War The Russian Civil War () was a multi-party civil war in the former Russian Empire sparked by the 1917 overthrowing of the Russian Provisional Government in the October Revolution, as many factions vied to determine Russia's political future. I ...

, the Ark was greatly damaged by

Red Army The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Republic and, from 1922, the Soviet Union. The army was established in January 1918 by a decree of the Council of People ...

troops under the command of

Mikhail Frunze Mikhail Vasilyevich Frunze (; ; 2 February 1885 – 31 October 1925) was a Soviet revolutionary, politician, army officer and military theory, military theorist. Born to a Bessarabian father and a Russian mother in Russian Turkestan, Frunze at ...

during the 1920 Battle of Bukhara. Frunze ordered the Ark bombed by aircraft, which left a large part of the structure in ruins. There is also reason to believe that the last Emir,

Mohammed Alim Khan Emir Sayyid Mir Muhammad Alim Khan ( Chagatai and , 3 January 1880 – 28 April 1944) was the last emir of the Uzbek Manghit dynasty, rulers of the Emirate of Bukhara in Central Asia. Although Bukhara was a protectorate of the Russian Empire ...

(1880–1944), who escaped to Afghanistan with the royal treasury, ordered the Ark to be blown up so that its sacred places (especially the harem) could not be defiled by the

Bolshevik The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, were a radical Faction (political), faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) which split with the Mensheviks at the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, ...

s. Archaeologists have proved that

emerged south of the lower course of the Zaravshan, which splits here into several channels, on a low marshy plain, above which a massive artificial hill of the city citadel - Ark still rises. As scientists believed, this citadel was a sprawling, repeatedly rebuilt and completed fortified manor. In the 5th to 6th centuries it had already expanded so much that it became a strong fortress with two gates (on the west and on the east), high above the plain. Legends attribute a long history to Bukhara and link its foundation to the mythical hero

, whose tomb was supposed to be at the eastern gate of the Ark. In

Kushan ''Kushan'' or Kushana may refer to: * Kushan Empire The Kushan Empire (– CE) was a Syncretism, syncretic empire formed by the Yuezhi in the Bactrian territories in the early 1st century. It spread to encompass much of what is now Afghanistan ...

times, a village appeared at a short distance from the Ark and to the southeast of it, eventually transformed into a regularly organized Shahristan. In the 7th century, the fortifications of the citadel were reconstructed and a new palace of Bukhar Khudahs was erected in it, the plan of which, as

tells us, repeated the shape of the constellation of the

for magical purposes. Next to the palace were built chancery buildings, a treasury, a prison and a temple. Beyond the western gate of the Ark stretched cultivated lands and gardens, above which rose more than two thousand fortified castles and stood hundreds of country estates, also fortified and not much different from castles. The gates overlooked the square called Registan - "Sandy". The eastern gate, later destroyed, faced the nearby shahristan. In the 8th century, by the arrival of the Arabs there were a palace of Bukhar Khudahs, the sacred tomb of the legendary hero

and a temple, which

Qutayba ibn Muslim Abū Ḥafṣ Qutayba ibn Abī Ṣāliḥ Muslim ibn ʿAmr al-Bāhilī (; 669–715/6) was an Arab commander of the Umayyad Caliphate who became governor of Khurasan and distinguished himself in the conquest of Transoxiana during the reign o ...

turned into a

mosque A mosque ( ), also called a masjid ( ), is a place of worship for Muslims. The term usually refers to a covered building, but can be any place where Salah, Islamic prayers are performed; such as an outdoor courtyard. Originally, mosques were si ...

. The first mosque of Bukhara was built by Arabs in 713 in Ark on the place of a "pagan" temple. This mosque was moved from the citadel down to the area between Ark and shahristan at the end of the 8th century. During the

Samanid The Samanid Empire () was a Persianate society, Persianate Sunni Islam, Sunni Muslim empire, ruled by a dynasty of Iranian peoples, Iranian ''dehqan'' origin. The empire was centred in Greater Khorasan, Khorasan and Transoxiana, at its greatest ...

period, between the western high facade of the Ark and the wall of the rabad, the Registan Square was created, and a palace with a

portal Portal may refer to: Arts and entertainment Gaming * ''Portal'' (series), a series of video games developed by Valve ** ''Portal'' (video game), a 2007 video game, the first in the series ** '' Portal 2'', the 2011 sequel ** '' Portal Stori ...

was built here, which

al-Istakhri Abu Ishaq Ibrahim ibn Muhammad al-Farisi al-Istakhri () (also ''Estakhri'', , i.e. from the Iranian city of Istakhr, b. – d. 346 AH/AD 957) was a 10th-century travel author and Islamic geographer who wrote valuable accounts in Arabic of ...

recognized as the grandest in the countries of

Islam Islam is an Abrahamic religions, Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the Quran, and the teachings of Muhammad. Adherents of Islam are called Muslims, who are estimated to number Islam by country, 2 billion worldwide and are the world ...

. The portal faced the entrance to the Ark.

Archaeological excavations and restoration

During the period of the Bukhara People's Soviet Republic, the western wall of the Ark was restored. A. A. Semyonov reported that a commission called the "Society of History" was established with the intention of writing the history of Ark. In the 1970s and 1980s, partial archaeological excavations were carried out in the Ark. Extensive archaeological excavations, especially in the southern part of the Ark and the surrounding area, had not yet been conducted. According to archaeologists, these excavations could provide more precise information about the actual age of

and either confirm or refute the legendary accounts of Narshahi, which claimed that

was 3,000 years old in the 10th century. From 1970 to 1974, significant stationary excavations were conducted on the Ark by a special archaeological team under the overall leadership of the academician of the Uzbekistan Academy of Sciences, Ya. G. Gulyamov. The upper layers dating from the 16th to the early 20th centuries were excavated within the fortress on an area of 120x100 meters. In 1979–1980, for the first time in the history of archaeological research of the Bukhara Ark, a stratigraphic trench (6x6 meters) allowed for deeper exploration of the mainland layer. The thickness of cultural deposits exceeded 20 meters here, with a third of this depth hidden underground. At a depth of 13-15.5 meters and 16.5-18.5 meters, remains of two robust adobe walls were discovered, possibly part of the ancient defensive structures of the Ark. The first wall, preserved to a height of 2.5-3 meters, dates back to the 4th to 5th centuries AD based on ceramic material, while the second wall, with a height of 2-2.5 meters, dates back to the 4th-3rd centuries BC. Undoubtedly, these are the ruins of the ancient fortress wall of

, which was one of the most important features in the city's development. A complete stratigraphic section of the fortress walls of the Ark was also studied. According to archaeological data obtained by E. G. Nekrasova in the stratigraphic section of the northern fortress wall of the Ark, the earliest wall was constructed from several layers of loess and loess blocks, with a height of 0.9-1.0 meters and a thickness of 0.7-0.75 meters. Its maximum width was 7.5 meters, and the minimum was 2.75 meters. In preparation for the 2,500th anniversary of

, on the initiative and under the leadership of the President of the

Republic of Uzbekistan , image_flag = Flag of Uzbekistan.svg , image_coat = Emblem of Uzbekistan.svg , symbol_type = Emblem of Uzbekistan, Emblem , national_anthem = "State Anthem of Uzbekistan, State Anthem of the Republ ...

Islam Karimov Islam Abduganiyevich Karimov (30 January 1938 – 2 September 2016) was an Uzbek politician who served as the first president of Uzbekistan, from the country's independence in 1991 until his death in 2016. He was the last First Secretary of the ...

(1990–2016), restoration work was carried out on the Ark.

Gallery

References

External links

Map of Bukhara (in Russian)
(Link was flagged as security threat)

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ark (Fortress) Buildings and structures in Bukhara Forts in Uzbekistan