The ancient city of Bukhara, Uzbekistan, is at least 2,400 years old.
During its peak in medieval times, the city was home to some of the most celebrated scholars, architects, philosophers, poets, and scientists of the Islamic world, including Ibn Sina (Avicenna), one of the fathers of modern medicine. Razed by Genghis Khan in the 13th century, later rebuilt, Bukhara eventually declined into a weak, isolated, and despotic city-state at the arid margins of the Russian, Persian, and British empires. Yet today Bukhara’s Old City still preserves dozens of mosques, caravanserais, and madrassas from its golden age—all masterpieces of Central Asian architecture recognized by UNESCO World Heritage Site status.
In 1918 the National Geographic writer and photographer Maynard Owen Williams passed through Bukhara and recorded several rare scenes from the city’s final days of political autonomy. Within two years Bukhara would be conquered by Russian Bolshevik troops, and its last Muslim Emir would flee to permanent exile in Afghanistan. Williams, like many journalists of his time, framed his views of Bukhara to emphasize the “exotic” or “antique” patina of Central Asian life. (The title of his magazine article: “Russia’s Orphan Races: Picturesque Peoples Who Cluster on the Southeastern Borderland of the Vast Slav Dominions.”) He also played into its romance as a once forbidden destination: For generations, the remote khanates of Central Asia banned non-Muslims from crossing their borders on pain of enslavement or worse. But Uzbek archaeologist Karim Rustamov notes that, by the time of Williams’s visit, global forces already were fundamentally reshaping the medieval societies of the region: Bukhara had acquired telephones, several Western-style buildings, a post office, and industrial goods were flooding its markets.
“Its days as a ‘closed city’ were long over,” Rustamov says.
About 60 years after Williams wandered through, another National Geographic photographer, Dean Conger, visited Bukhara, at that time a provincial town in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Uzbekistan. In unpublished 1970s photos from the magazine’s archives, Conger reveals Soviet archaeologists digging huge holes in the center of the Old City in an effort to push back its founding date.
As the paired photos attest, the world has changed dramatically since Bukhara flourished a millennium ago as a hub of camel-borne trade between Europe and Asia. But while the Silk Road traversing the steppes of Uzbekistan may have given way to a Digital Road that directly accesses our minds, the role of the city as a connector of humanity—nowadays through cultural tourism—endures.
