Aksaray-Mausoleum

The Aksaray stands a short way south-east of the Gur-e-Amir, Timur’s dynastic mausoleum, and Uzbekistan’s nomination file to UNESCO describes it as another family mausoleum of the Timurids, from the end of the 15th century². Archnet dates it to about 1470, and the Registan Ensemble Directorate to 1460-1470, calling it the burial vault of male members of the last Timurids^3,4. Its name means ‘white palace’^4,5. A 2022 article published by UzA, the national news agency, counts it among the old buildings of Samarkand renamed by newcomers who did not know their history: people brought in from other regions when Amir Shahmurad of Bukhara revived the city after it had emptied in the 18th century⁶.

By the 20th century the building was almost completely ruined, and the Arts and Culture Development Foundation reports a large conservation campaign in 1924-1925⁵. Archnet holds a photograph of it in ruins taken by Ernst Cohn-Wiener in 1924-1925³. The nomination file records further conservation from 1976 to 1996, when some later additions were removed². In 2007 the mausoleum was completely restored, according to the Foundation⁵. It is one of the monuments described in Uzbekistan’s nomination of Samarkand, which was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2001^1,2.

The nomination file describes a small building of several rooms: a square memorial hall (ziyaratkhana), corner cells and three rooms from which a passage leads down to an octagonal vault with many graves². The Registan Ensemble Directorate describes the core as a cruciform hall used as a memorial room, with corner cells and a three-part hall, above an octagonal crypt lined with marble⁴. The nomination file singles out the unusual construction of the whole building, and especially of the hall’s dome². None of the outer decoration survives, and the Arts and Culture Development Foundation describes the single-domed building as nondescript from the outside^2,5.

Inside, panels of fine glazed mosaic and carving line the lower walls, and the walls, pendentives and dome above carry ornamental painting in blue and gold in the kundal technique^2,4. In 2020 the Registan Ensemble Directorate described the original painting as surviving in fragments⁴. The Arts and Culture Development Foundation, reporting the complete restoration of 2007, calls the gilded decor a ‘reincarnation’ of the mausoleum, and notes the long corridor built as a staircase that leads from the domed hall down to the marble crypt⁵.