A sunset over Po-i-Kalyon.
Showcasing Bukhara must be the easiest job ever, or so I thought with the clarity that suddenly comes when you're into your third pint-sized bottle of Portland beer (the fact that an Uzbek brew had the picture of a clipper boat and a light house not becoming any less amusing as the days went by). But back to the view.
It was our last evening in Bukhara and, whilst originally I felt ambivalent about staying there for so long - Khiva, Kokand, Termez were all tantalisingly close - I now regretted leaving at all. We had a shaky beginning, Bukhara and I (trading insults with a cabbie outside the mausoleum of a Sufi holy man isn't exactly an auspicious way to get things off), but by that evening she - because it's a lady, you see - had crept under my skin and had lodged itself firmly into my heart. To know why, you just need to read on; unless you're one of those fellows who'd rather go to Cincinnati "because it's safer", despite it having a murder rate almost three times higher than Uzbekistan's, I think you'll agree with me.
Tell me, for instance, how not to stroll around Po-i-Kalyon, or by the walls of the Ark, at sunset and not to agree with an awesomely-named fellow called Fitzroy Maclean, who in 1939 confessed that "I could have spent months in Bukhara, seeking out fresh memories of the prodigious past, mingling with the bright crowds in the bazaar, or simply idling away my time under the apricot trees in the clear warm sunlight of Central Asia".
Bukhara steals breaths by the bucketful with its party pieces, its memories of the golden age of Abdullah Khan, its architectural marvels inspired by Persia by way of Herat, Afghanistan. A sequence of dazzling madrassas and gorgeous mosques whose names -Siddikyon, Mir-i-Arab, Nadir Divan-Beg - roll on Bukharans' tongues like aged cognac.
But it's also a place of unexpected quirks. An eight-hundred-year old minaret, decorated with Zoroastrian motifs, that can claim to have caused none other than Genghis Khan to drop his hat. Or the mausoleum of a man, dead for more than 1,000 years, who had become the founding father of neighbouring Tajikistan even without having been born, or having spent any significant amount of time, there. (Just don't go telling it around in Dushanbe). Or perhaps the gate house of a madrasa, built around the time when Europe started wearing starched collars and talk about electromagnetism. Some would call Chor minor old-fashioned. To me, it's classy.
But the thing that, in the end, will really get you, that will haul you onboard like the harpoon of those long-line fishermen over on Discovery Channel, will be the unexpected surprises that Bukhara will randomly dip out of her pocket and toss on the ground, like breadcrumbs for you to follow to her trap. It'll be a Jewish community who lived in a particular side of downtown for more than 2,000 years before relocating, pretty much en masse, to Queens; it'll be a small photography museum, whence you'll depart with more postcards than you've ever bought in a decade. It'll be hand-written Korans, hidden passageways, delicate domes, shops sprouting in the least expected places. Glimpses of treasures that will make you suddenly realise - probably as you down the third beer on your last evening - that you might as well be spending a year here, but it won't ever be enough.
And this is before we even got to talk about the people.
