Only in a dimly lit and stark, domed crypt, made of nothing but plain red brick, did I find shelter from the mind-boggling splendour above. When my eyes had adjusted to the dark, I noticed a marble slab at my feet, a modest commemorative to Amir Temur, better known as the brutal conqueror Tamerlane.
The cellar of the Gur-i-Mir mausoleum in Samarkand is probably the only trace of modesty Temur left behind when he raged across much of Asia six centuries ago.
In an octagonal hall on the ground floor, above where I am standing, Temur’s grave is marked by a dark green block of jade, reputed to be the largest in the world. It rests on an onyx floor, a sea of green stone from Iran that also covers the walls, and is topped by a dazzling cupola covered in goldleaf and bright blue paint. Outside, a ribbed azure dome rises like a balloon above the brightly tiled facade.
It was not so much the superlative splendour that had overwhelmed me. It was more the sad realisation that I had arrived too late. Had I come just a few years earlier, I would have been looking at the real thing. Less splendid but real.
The two minarets and part of the facade outside, their clean yellow bricks in sharp contrast with the faded beige stones below, are brand new. The paint on the cupola’s ceiling is fresh and painfully bright, the slabs of onyx are shiny and, in the corners, do not quite match.
“It looks like a bathroom,” gasped Michael Lane, head of the Unesco office in Uzbekistan, with the pained look of a father who finds his son has spray-painted his 1933 Bentley.
“They didn’t need to touch it. It looked fine as it was. It just looked old.”
I could only sympathise. For a moment I, too, thought I had landed in the bathroom of one of the New Russians - or New Uzbeks in this case - the nouveau riche who struck it rich in the break-up of the Soviet Union and gained fame for their love of kitsch and glamour.
In celebration of the 660th birthday of Temur, a Mongol warlord chosen to replace Lenin as father of this newly independent nation, Uzbekistan last year embarked on some of the more drastic and controversial restorations in modern history.
In a matter of months, thousands of construction workers have restored and even rebuilt parts of the famous Registan ensemble of madrasahs, Temur’s mausoleum, the Bibi Khanym mosque and several other grand monuments he left behind in the city of Samarkand.
At Bibi Khanym, much of it a ruin for centuries, builders are working at a pace not seen since Temur’s days, least of all in the Soviet era. They have every intention of continuing until the mosque looks just like new, even if that means discarding traces of the past.
“We did a grandiose job,” says Ilkhom Rashidov, deputy hokim, or governor, of the region and a fan of Soviet cliches. “Samarkand received the Order of Amir Temur. One of the most active restorers was ordained Hero of Uzbekistan. The Samarkandi can be proud of guarding their heritage for 600 years. Gur-i-Mir has changed beyond recognition.”
To Lane and many other Uzbek and non-Uzbek historians, that is exactly what is wrong with the restoration of Samarkand’s monuments. To them, the rapid and drastic restoration, and especially the decision to rebuild monuments that have been ruins for half a millennium, amount to archaeological blasphemy.
“It’s not all bad. There are good examples there,” Lane hurries to say, fearful of insulting a government for which “touchy” would be an understated adjective.
“Many of these monuments were on the verge of total collapse. If they hadn’t acted when they did, we would have nothing to talk about now. They would have disappeared,” he says.
“We’re not here to criticise. We’re on their territory. But when part of the building has totally disappeared and you have no evidence of what it looked like, you would not be justified in rebuilding it from conjecture.
“When you are talking about monuments that are so important, they should be restored and conserved with enormous care.”
This is cultural snobbery, as far as Samarkand’s chief architect, Khabib Kayumov, is concerned. “There are a lot of different approaches to restoration, and they all have a certain validity,” says Kayumov, behind a table that sports a broken tile from Gur-i-Mir, shaped like a sun and covered with flower patterns.
“And our restorers knew about all those methods. But every people have monuments that are the essence of their self-consciousness, and those should be restored completely and passed from generation to generation.
“You can’t imagine the Kremlin in ruins either, can you? Or Notre Dame half built?”
Rashidov, the deputy governor, adds: “We often hear from foreign experts that it’s better to conserve than to rebuild.
“But if it’s possible to recreate what was there, for our descendants, for our people and their collective memory, it’s better to rebuild. Ruins don’t carry that historic weight.”
He has a point. How many people see anything but a few toppled pillars at the Forum in Rome? As I stood in the centre of the Registan ensemble, squinting at the sun, I could easily imagine the fierce warriors of Tamerlane lurking in the shade of the balconies of the Tilla Kari madrasha. And was that Mir Said Berekh, his spiritual mentor, squatting in prayer in the Golden Mosque?
Then again, some tourists might feel cheated when they fly all the way to Samarkand to gaze at what look like Hollywood props.
Kayumov insists that extensive historical research has provided sufficient clues to justify the reconstruction, and points out that whenever it did not suffice, he did not rebuild anything.
“Only if our research confirms the function, height and appearance can we talk about reconstruction,” he says. Only the two front minarets of the Gur-i-Mir were restored, he explains, and not to the full length because the shape of the balconies which topped them is still in dispute.
Unconvinced, Unesco has threatened to keep Samarkand off the list of World Heritage sites, which receive special funding.
Some Uzbek restorers admit privately that they, too, are horrified, but they will not speak out for fear of losing their jobs, or more. A pensioner who protested at the razing of the old quarters in the capital of Tashkent spent 148 days in the basement of the city jail.
The tight deadline for Temur’s 660th anniversary, last October, left little time for discussion and study. Especially in the last months, construction workers laboured round the clock.
Temur, too, was in a hurry. He wanted to leave his mark on history, and he liked his marks big. In Samarkand, where he held court, hundreds of artisans captured on his campaigns rushed to build the giant Bibi Khanym mosque in just five years.
When he visited the site and judged the entrance gate too small, he tore it down, hanged its architects and started anew.
Soon after the mosque opened, however, cracks appeared in the oversized walls, tiles tumbled down and eventually the top of the entrance caved in. By the time the Bolsheviks moved in, little was left but the main temple and the pillars that had failed to buttress the arched entryway.
Will the newly resurrected monuments stand the tests of time and earthquakes any better than Temur’s originals? At Gur-i-Mir I tripped over a new threshold and a brick came loose.
At the construction site of Bibi Khanym, one worker points up at the concrete archway that rests on newly laid bricks 50 metres high. “We built it too fast, too sloppily,” he says. “Because we don’t have enough skilled labourers we are using any old hand we can get. In 10 years we will have to do it all over again.”
On an incline in the centre of town, an oversized bronze-coloured plaster Temur sits on his throne, his hands leaning on the sword that shed so much blood, his eyes set on the newer, brighter copies of his heritage. From afar his cruel eyes appear to approve.
But when I moved closer to his knees and looked up, I could not help but notice that his eyes appeared to bulge in shock, his eyebrows raised in indignation.
