Mongolia | Zaisan Tolgoi | Autumn Equinox | Harvest Moon

The Autumn Equinox Lady

You are all probably busy making your plans for the celebration of the Autumn Equinox, which occurs here in Mongolia on Thursday, the 23rd, at 11:09 AM. Here on the 23rd the sun comes up at 6:40 in the morning and sets at 6:49, making a day of twelve hours and nine minutes. Lately I have going each morning to the summit of Zaisan Tolgoi, near my hovel, to observe the sunrise and will undoubtedly be there on Thursday morning. I usually leave my hovel at 5:30, while most of you sluggards are still on bed, and arrive at the summit at about 6:00. Oddly enough, I am not alone at this hour. Three other people, two Mongolian men and a Mongolian woman, all looking to be in their sixties, also come to the summit each morning. The woman circumambulates the summit several times, stopping at each of the cardinal points to make prostrations. The men appear to be engaged in various and sundry meditations. 

The summit of Zaisan Tolgoi

Although I  intend to celebrate the Autumn Equinox I will not be engaging in any heedless bacchanals, unlike some people I could name, but will instead engage in Orisons more in tune with the sobering times in which we live. As I always do on these occasions, I am once again imploring people not to engage in any animal or Human Sacrifices. If you live in New York City I want to emphasis that Union Square is not a suitable venue for sacrifices of any kind, animal or human (if you are in Union Square, however, you might want to wander by the Strand Bookstore).

This year’s Autumn Equinox is especially auspicious because it occurs on the same day as the Harvest Moon. If you are still celebrating the Equinox on the evening of the 23th, as I suspect you will be, I suggest that before you stumble into your drinking dens for a night of senseless dissipation you glance up into the sky and watch the totally inspiring sight of the Harvest Moon sliding between Jupiter and the Great Square of Pegasus . 

Uzbekistan | Khoresm | Khiva | Kalta Minaret

The next morning I wended my way through the streets of the Old City, heading westward toward the Ata Darzava, or Master Gate. As I mentioned, the Old City is one vast museum, with people living within it. Early risers like myself can see many families, all in their pajamas, sleeping on their front porches, enjoying the fresh night air. Out of respect for the privacy of these people I will not include photos. 

Street in the Old City

Just to the east of the Master Gate and in front of the Muhammad Amin Khan Madrasa is the Kalta Minaret, also known as the Guyok (Green) Minaret. The Khivan Ruler Muhammad Amin Khan ordered its construction in the early 1850s. According to plan, this was to be the grandest minaret in Transoxiania, with a height of 70 to 80 meters (230 to 262 feet), but it was not finished when the Khan died in 1855. There are two legends as to why the minaret was not completed. One says that the Khan halted construction after he suddenly realized that anyone on the top of the minaret would be able to peer down into his harem and see his wives. Another legend maintains that when the Amir of Bukhara found out about the minaret he made a secret agreement with the architect to build an even taller one in Bukhara. Somehow Muhammad Amin Khan found out about this and he issued a secret order that the architect was to be killed as soon as the minaret was completed. This order somehow reached the ears of the architect and he fled the city while construction was still taking place. In any case, the minaret was never finished. It is now 29 meters (95 feet) high, with bottom diameter of 11.2 meters (37 feet). 

 The truncated Kalta Minaret

Another view of the mineret

The minaret is connected to the Muhammad Amin Khan Madrasa (School), built 1851–55. 

Shops in front of the minaret and madrasa 

The minaret and madrasa from the top of the Citadel

Uzbekistan | Khoresm | Khiva | Samarkand | Bukhara | 1910 Photos

Below are some photos (cropped versions of the originals) by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) who traveled through the Russian empire, which then included modern-day Uzbekistan, in the years 1909–1912. The photos in Khiva, Bukhara, and Samarkand were taken around 1910. Who knew they had color photography back then?  Prokudin-Gorskii used an experimental color process which had apparently been invented in Russia. 

Emir Seyyid Mir Mohammed Alim Khan, the Emir of Bukhara

Isfandiyar Jurji Bahadur, Khan of the Russian protectorate of Khorezm (Khiva, now a part of modern Uzbekistan)

 A group of Jewish children with a teacher in Samarkand

A boy sits in the court of Tillia-Kari mosque in Samarkand

For the original versions of these photos and many more see Photos of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. Thanks to a fellow Wanderer in Virginia USA for sending along this link . . . 

Uzbekistan | Khoresm | Khiva | Shaxrizoda Hotel

The entire inner city of Khiva, an area covering seventy-five or so acres, is one vast open-air museum. At least fifty historic buildings—mosques, tombs, palaces, caravanserais, etc.—and several hundred domestic dwellings have been refurbished and restored. Admittedly, this creates somewhat of a sterile atmosphere, but if you accept the place as a museum—which indeed is what it advertises itself as—then it has to rank as one of the world’s more intriguing museums. Reportedly some 3000 people live within The Walls of the Inner City—that is to say within the museum—and most visitors also stay in guesthouses in the Inner City, making them live-in patrons of the museum. Most of the guesthouses are either refurbished eighteenth and nineteenth century merchants’ houses or replicas of merchants’ houses. And these old Silk Road merchants liked to live in style. Many of their homes qualified as mansions; today they make extremely comfortable guesthouses. Most of the guest houses seem to be run by single families who live on the premises. I stayed at the Shaxrizoda Hotel, right inside the south gate of the Inner City. Shaxrizoda is a Uzbek rendering of Scheherazade, the story-teller from One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. 

Entrance to the Shaxrizoda Hotel

Lobby of the Shaxrizoda Hotel

Dining Room and Balcony

Display Case in Dining Room

Second Floor Hallway

Bed

Silk Wall Hanging in Dining Room showing Shahryar, the King to whom Scheherazade tells her stories in the One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. 

 The hotel is managed by the wife in the family and her daughters. The daughters speak English. The husband is a wood carver and furniture maker. Here is one of his beds. The price is $50,000, not counting shipping to your home country. Within the past year he has sold three of these beds to European and American businessmen. 

Uzbekistan | Khoresm | Khiva | City Walls

Wandered on out to Khiva, near New Urgench, on the lower Amu Darya River, the Oxus of Antiquity, (do not confuse New Urgench with Old Urgench, which was largely destroyed by the armies of Chingis Khan in the 1220s; the ruins of Old Urgench are in the current-day country of Turkmenistan). The city of Khiva itself, which according to legend was founded after the Flood by one of the sons of Noah, he of Ark fame (the city celebrated the 2500th anniversary of its founding in 1997; this date based on archeological and not Biblical evidence), is divided into the two parts, the old Ichan Qaia or Inner City, which has has been preserved more or less as it was at the end of the nineteenth century, and the modern Outer City. The Inner City is completely contained within the old city walls, which have repaired and restored. 

Section of the Old City Walls

One section of the Old Wall contains the Konya Ark, or Old Citadel, built in the seventeenth century.

Another view of the Old Citadel

Tombs on one section of the Old City walls; they were placed here to turn back the superstitious Turkmen tribesmen who were forever investing the city. 

View of the city walls from the Citadel, with the new city to the left

The west-facing Ata Darzava, or Master Gate, just to the right of the Citadel. This is the main entrance to the Old City. 

 View of the Inner City from the Citadel

 View of the Inner City looking west, with the Eastern Gate in the foreground

Mongolia | Töv Aimag | Bürkhiin Gol | White Russian Battle

I have traveled up the Bürkhiin Gol, which flows into the Kherlen River near Möngönmort in Töv Aimag, several times while on my way to Khagiin Khar Nuur, a well known resting place in the Khentii Mountains; Asralt Khairkhan Uul, the highest mountain in the Khentii Range; Yestiin Rashaan, a hot springs complex frequented by Zanabazar, the First Bogd Gegeen of Mongolia; the ruins of the monastery founded by Zanabazar, Saridgiin Khiid, and other places in the Khentii Mountains.

Valley of the Bürkhiin Gol

Near where the Bürkhin Gol emerges from the mountains out into the valley of the Kherlen Gol I had often taken note of a monument which seemed to indicate that the great revolutionary Sükhebaatar fought a battle here again Baron Ungern-Sternberg’s White Russian army back in 1921. 

Monument on the Bürkhiin Gol 

I was never, however, able to find out any details about this battle. Now comes word from Dr. S. L. Kuzmin in Moscow, who has already written at length about Ungern-Sternberg and is now preparing another book about the notorious Bloody Baron, that the battle took place here on August 21 or 22 of 1921. According to Dr. Kuzmin, after the Baron had been captured by the Bolsheviks two brigades of his former army fled eastward toward Manchuria. They fought a short and inconclusive battle here with Red partisans and finally managed to break out and continue on eastward.  Apparently they were shown a route through the mountains by a lama who was following the secret orders issued by 8th Bogd Gegeen which instructed his followers to help Ungern-Sternberg’s men retreat safely to Manchuria. Expect more details for Dr. Kuzmin’s upcoming book. 

Uzbekistan | Samarkand | Sarai Mulk’s Mausoleum

Although concerned mostly with the remnants of the city which survived the sack of Samarkand by Chingis Khan in 1220 I would be remiss if I did not wander by other Mongol-related sites in the city. Perhaps the most famous of these is the mausoleum and tomb of Sarai Mulk, also known by the title Bibi Khanum, the Mongolian wife of Amir Timur (Tamurlane). Whether Amir Timur (1336–1405), was related to the Chingisids by blood is a matter of some dispute. He was a member of the Turco-Mongol Barlas tribe and thus may have been part Mongolian, but it seems unlikely that he was actually a member of the royal line of Chingis. In any case he never dared to take the title of Great Khan, which according to the unwritten laws of the steppe could only be held by a Chingisid, a lineal descendant of Chingis Khan, but instead took the title of “Amir”—military commander. In order to further legitimize his rule he married the Mongolian princess Sarai Mulk, the daughter of Khazan, the last ruler of the Chagatai Khanate founded by Chagatai, Chingis’s second son, and thus a legitimate Chingisid. Sarai Mulk was a legendary beauty, to say nothing of willful and domineering, and she eventually became the favorite wife of Amir Timur. 

At some point she ordered the construction of a madrassa, an Islamic school, and a mausoleum for herself and immediate family. Little else is known about her life. There is a legend that the architect who was building what became known as the Bibi Khanum Mosque, near her Mausoleum, fell madly in love with her and was constantly seeking her favors. Trying to dissuade him, she pointed out forty dried gourds used as water containers which were lined up against a wall. “See those gourds?” she said, “they are all filled with water and are all the same. Women are like the gourds. They are all the same. It matters not which one you use to slake your desires. Choose any of my servant girls you want and spent the night with her. That should be enough to satisfy your needs.” The architect replied, “Thirty-nine of the gourds are filled with water and one is filled with wine. You are the one filled with wine and I must drink from your gourd.” She still refused him entry to her Jade Gate, but finally she did let allow him to kiss her on the cheek. Amir Timur was in India at the time leading a military campaign. When he returned to Samarkand he somehow found out about this kiss (the legend states the kiss was so passionate that it left a mark on her cheek) and in a fit of jealousy he threw Sarai Mulk off the top of a minaret. She was then buried in her Mausoleum. This is the legend anyhow. As far as I know, history does not record any other version of Sarai Mulk’s death. 

Sarai Mulk’s Mausoleum. Her Madrassa, which was directly in front of the Mausoleum, no longer exists. 

Inside the Mausoleum. Sarai Mulk and her relatives are entombed in the basement crypt.

The Caskets of Sarai Mulk (left), and her Mother and Sister

The Casket of Sarai Mulk

Caskets of two of Sarai Mulk’s servants, perhaps the very ones which the architect unwisely spurned.

Another view of Sarai Mulk’s Mausoleum