Samarkand

I spent last Thursday and Friday as a tourist in Samarkand with my daughter, who has been staying with us for the holidays. This is my second visit since arriving as Ambassador in Tashkent. The first was short and official, taking in British businesses and the city Hokimiat and Chamber of Commerce: useful and important, but I was keen to come back privately and see the sights.

I visited Samarkand once before, more than twenty years ago when I was working in the British Embassy in Moscow. I remember the big monuments being much more closely surrounded by the city, the Bibi Khanum Mosque particularly, and I don’t think the big dual carriageway that goes past the Shah-i-Zinda complex was there then. The wide pedestrian street between the Registan and the Bibi Khanum Mosque is definitely new. There are also far more hotels. Last time I visited, as foreigners we were obliged to stay in the one Intourist hotel. This time we stayed in a very comfortable small family-run hotel almost in sight of the Gur Emir. It was easy to arrange private transport to visit the mausoleum of al-Bukhari, twenty kilometres outside the city – and interesting to see new fruit orchards being planted along the roadside.

At the Registan we were approached by a police officer – who identified us as foreigners from several hundred metres away – and asked if we would take part in a training video, in which he would be shown giving us directions. We agreed and had a pleasant conversation on film, in English and Russian, before looking round the magnificent Medressahs. It’s good to see places like Samarkand becoming easier for foreign visitors to negotiate. Relatively few British tourists come to Uzbekistan at the moment, but there’s scope for much more activity. Getting the information out is essential, and I’m glad to see Uzbek agencies participating in travel fairs in London, and coverage of the country in the UK’s travel press and in tour company brochures.

Samarkand is in the British consciousness at least as far back as Marlowe: his “Tamburlaine the Great” deviates greatly from historical reality, but made Timur and his capital city familiar names. But it’s James Elroy Flecker, in his poem “The Golden Journey to Samarkand” who really fixed it in the British imagination. The poem is a great piece of romantic orientalism, in which Samarkand is never described, but is a name for all that is distant and hard to reach and mysteriously promising, the destination of the camel trains that set out from Baghdad, the merchants and the pilgrims in search of riches or enlightenment. Modern travel – including the very comfortable Afrosiab trains from Tashkent – takes away the danger and the difficulty, but the Timurid monuments, in their restored splendour, are impressive and beautiful, and the remains of Afrosiab are an indication of a history going much further back into an ultimately uncharted past.

I hope over the next few years we will see more British visitors coming to Uzbekistan, and more visitors from Uzbekistan to Britain. All kinds of contacts, unofficial as well as official, cultural and educational, commercial and touristic, help make a strong and effective relationship between our countries.