Ichan-Kala, the Walled Inner Town

Ichan-Kala is the inner town of Khiva: about 26 hectares enclosed by mud-brick walls, with four gates facing the points of the compass. Inside are more than fifty historic monuments and a few hundred old houses, most of them built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Khiva was the capital of an independent khanate on the lower Amu Darya. People still live here, which is what separates it from an open-air museum: children walk to school past madrasahs, and laundry dries on flat roofs beside tiled domes.

A town rebuilt by its khans

Khiva is old. Archaeologists have found traces of settlement going back well over two thousand years, and local tradition says the town grew around the Kheivak well, dug, the legend runs, by Shem, son of Noah. But the Ichan-Kala you walk through today is largely the work of the Kungrat dynasty of khans in the nineteenth century, who rebuilt the town after decades of war with Persia and Bukhara. That is why it feels so unified: the same clay brick, the same blue-and-white majolica, the same carved elm columns repeat from building to building. In 1873 Russian troops took the town and the khanate became a protectorate, but the khans stayed on until 1920, and they kept building almost to the end.

What to see

The main street runs east from the west gate, Ota-Darvoza, past the unfinished Kalta Minor and the Kunya-Ark citadel to the Palvan-Darvoza gate on the eastern side. Along it and in the lanes to the south are the sights most visitors come for:

• Kalta Minor and the Muhammad Amin Khan Madrasah by the west gate
• The Kunya-Ark, the khans’ citadel, with its tiled reception hall and watchtower
• The Juma Mosque and its hall of more than two hundred carved wooden columns
• The Pakhlavan Makhmud Mausoleum and the Islam Khodja Minaret, the tallest in Khiva
• The Tash-Hauli Palace near the east gate, with its majolica harem courtyard

Experiencing it

Ichan-Kala is small enough to cross on foot in ten minutes, but it deserves at least a full day. Arrive early, before the tour groups and the heat, and leave the middle of the day for a long lunch or a rest. The best light comes in the last hour before sunset, when the clay walls turn gold; climb the walls or a watchtower to see the domes and minarets together. After dark, when day-trippers have gone, the lanes are quiet and several monuments are lit. Staying inside or just outside the walls is the single best decision you can make in Khiva.