SamarkandTravel Guide

Three colossal madrasahs — Ulugh Beg, Sher-Dor with its famous tiger mosaics, and gold-drenched Tilya-Kori — face each other across one square.

An ascending lane of mausoleums, each face a different variation on blue, white and turquoise, packed so tightly the passage feels less like a street than a corridor of pattern.

Timur's mausoleum is a lesson in restraint outside and overwhelming gold inside, where the conqueror lies beneath a slab of dark jade.

Inside the Registan's northern madrasah is a prayer hall lined with gilding over blue, painted to imitate a domed ceiling on what is actually a flat surface — a piece of illusionism that is more impressive in person than in any photograph of it.

Built at breakneck speed as one of the Islamic world's largest mosques, Bibi-Khanym was audacious to the point of structural trouble — which is exactly what makes its scarred, partly restored vastness so moving.

The pedestrianised street running north-east from the Registan towards Bibi-Khanym and the bazaar — long known as Tashkent Street, and renamed for Uzbekistan's first president in 2017 — was rebuilt as a landscaped shopping promenade lined with low-rise craft shops selling ceramics, lacquered caskets, chapans and silk.

cards work at larger hotels and newer restaurants; carry som in cash for the bazaar, taxis and family guesthouses

since early 2026 most nationalities have been able to enter Uzbekistan visa-free for around thirty days — check the rule against your own passport before you book