khiva – At Home In The Wasteland Travel Blog

October 23, 2012

No one really knows when Khiva was founded, but the local legend is that it happened over 2,500 years ago when Shem, the son of Noah, found himself wandering through the desert after the great floodwaters receded. He stumbled upon a well, exclaiming “Khi-wa!” (sweet water) and this ancient oasis has been hydrating travelers since.

Legends aside, Khiva has existed since at least the 10th, and possibly 6th century. In 1619 it became the capital of the Khanate of Khiva and eventually grew into the largest slave trading center on the Silk Road. The slave bazaar held thousands of Russians, Persians, and Kurds who were unfortunate enough to be dragged from their homes or fields by Turkoman raiding parties and then sold to the highest bidder in the open air markets of Khiva.

The slave markets are now long gone, and today the inner city of Khiva, the Itchan Kala, is preserved as an open-air museum and UNESCO World Heritage site. The inner city is very compact, and after that grueling 9.5 hour bus drive the previous day, it felt wonderful to spend an entire day roaming this lovely area of Khiva. Some travelers complain that Khiva is “too tidy” and that the Soviets swept away all the dirt and grime that defined this city for so many centuries. Yes, walking around at times, the inner city was eerily quiet, but at other times it was lively, filled with wedding parties or groups of little kids following you asking for “bon bons” (candy) or pencils (unfortunately, I had neither on me).

Tombs on the walls of the inner city

Kalta-minor Minaret, the most recognizable feature of Khiva. It was left uncompleted after the death of Muhammad Amin Khan, although local legend states that construction was abandoned after it was discovered that the muezzin could see into the Khan’s harem from atop the minaret.

SIR! Please do not feed your baby to the camel!

Wood carving – from small cutting boards to giant doors.

Suzani

Weddings everywhere!

Inside the Pahlavon Mahmud Mausoleum. Mahmud is considered the patron saint of Khiva.

Check out that dress!

Night descends upon Khiva. The inner city quickly empties, leaving just a few lost tourists and the families who still live there.

October 22, 2012

The journey along the A-380 highway from Bukhara to Khiva was one of the longest stretches of driving we did on this trip. The distance between the two cities is only 285 miles, but the journey took us a grueling 9.5 hours due to the state of the highway, which wasn’t quite a highway at the time, but rather a packed sand and gravel road through the Kyzyl Kum desert. The highway was undergoing a major reconstruction project at the time (and probably still is, since the vast majority of workers spent their time waving at all the passing vehicles!) and so was in a particularly sorry state. A German company had won the contract to rebuild the road, and the portions of the road they had completed allowed us to quickly pass through the desert. Once we reached the under construction part, however, it was a slow, bumpy ride for hour upon hour. Despite the air-conditioned bus and tinted windows, the heat from the midday sun seeped through. The landscape was similar to the desert I had grown up in, with the exception that civilization in the Kyzyl Kum seemed non-existent, except for the occasional construction crews and stray dogs that lazed in the shade of concrete barriers.

Aside from the desert landscape, signs of the New Great Game abounded along this highway through the desert. We passed dozens of large Willi Betz tractor trailers driven by Eastern Europeans, transporting supplies for over 3,000 miles from Riga, Latvia to the U.S. military in Afghanistan. Supposedly these trucks only transport “non-lethal” supplies to Afghanistan, so I wondered what they were bringing to my military friends serving there. Bars of soap? Boxes of Frosted Flakes? Cases of Red Bull?

In other areas we passed huge fields of new pipeline that, once installed, will transport Turkmen and Uzbek natural gas to Europeans. While to many this is merely steel pipe, it was of great interest to me. I wrote my graduate school dissertation on these “New Great Game” pipelines and briefly worked in the oil and gas industry afterward, so to see this in action, outside the confines of boring technical journal articles, was fascinating.