Four days in Samarkand: the city Timur built to be envied

Give the first evening to the square. The Registan was the town's central marketplace and its parade ground, the place where khans read proclamations and where heads were displayed afterwards, and three madrasas were built around it as the city's fortunes rose and fell. Ulugh Beg's is the oldest, on the west side, finished around 1420 and taught astronomy and mathematics at a level nowhere else in the region matched. Sher-Dor faces it from the east, completed in the 1630s, with a pair of improbable tiger-lions chasing white deer across its portal under a sun with a human face, which is a fairly bold thing to put on a religious building. Tilya-Kori closes the north side, and its prayer hall is lined in gold leaf to the top of the dome.

Come at five, when the light turns the tile from blue to violet, and stay for the floodlighting. There is a sound and light show on summer evenings that is enjoyably terrible.

Then walk fifteen minutes south to Gur-e-Emir before dinner, or leave it for first thing tomorrow. It was begun for Timur's favourite grandson Muhammad Sultan, who died young on campaign, and ended up as the family vault: Timur himself, two sons, and Ulugh Beg, who was buried here after his own son had him beheaded. The dome is ribbed and turquoise, the chamber below is alabaster, jasper and gilding, and in the middle is the darkest green slab of nephrite you will ever see.

Start early at Shah-i-Zinda and work backwards, because this is the site the coaches reach after lunch and it is the one that suffers most from a crowd. It is not a monument but a street: a narrow lane of some twenty tombs climbing a slope, built mostly in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for Timurid princesses, generals and court women, each one a small facade of carved and glazed tile, and each one competing with its neighbour. At the top is the shrine of Kusam ibn Abbas, a cousin of the Prophet, which is why this became a place to be buried at all. Take twice as long as you planned.

Downhill from it lies Afrosiyab, which is where Samarkand was for the first fifteen hundred years of its life until Genghis Khan destroyed it in 1220. There is nothing left standing. It is a bare, eroded plateau of dust and mud-brick stumps, and it is the oldest thing in the city by a very long way. The small museum at its foot holds the reason to walk up: a wall of seventh century Sogdian painting, uncovered in 1965, showing ambassadors bringing tribute, a wedding procession and a princess on a white elephant. Nothing else like it survives from pre-Islamic Central Asia.

Come back down through the Siyob bazaar for lunch, and finish at Bibi-Khanym. Timur ordered it built with the plunder of his Indian campaign and it was too ambitious to stand: bricks were dropping out of the great arch within a few years of completion and it spent five centuries as a magnificent ruin before the Soviets began putting it back. The scale is what stays with you, that and the marble Quran stand in the courtyard the size of a small car.

Shakhrisabz is ninety minutes south by taxi over the Takhtakaracha pass, a road of switchbacks and roadside honey sellers that is worth the trip on its own. Timur was born in a village near here in the 1330s and it was his home town, which is why he began a palace here that was meant to make Samarkand look modest.

Ak Saray, the white palace, was started in 1380 with the craftsmen and money of conquered Khorezm and worked on for twenty odd years. What is left is two colossal fragments of the entrance pylons, standing maybe forty metres and originally far higher, faced in blue and gold mosaic and split by the gap where the arch used to be. Clavijo, the Spanish ambassador who came through in 1404, found it still unfinished and full of workmen. Nothing else of the palace survives at all.

The other half of the town is the funerary side. Dorus Saodat was the dynastic burial complex, and under it is a crypt found in 1963 holding a marble sarcophagus carved with Timur's name: the tomb he had made for himself, which he never used, because he died in the wrong season and was buried in Samarkand instead. Kok Gumbaz, the blue dome, is the Friday mosque Ulugh Beg raised in 1435 for his father. One caution: the old town around these buildings was demolished in 2015 and replaced with an enormous park, which is why UNESCO put the site on its danger list. The monuments now stand in a lot of empty paving.

Keep the strangest thing for last. Ulugh Beg ruled badly and observed the sky brilliantly, and in the 1420s he built an observatory on a hill north-east of the city with an instrument so large that most of it had to be sunk into the bedrock: a marble arc some forty metres in radius, aligned north to south, along which the sun's shadow could be read off with extraordinary precision. With it he and his colleagues catalogued more than a thousand stars and calculated the length of the year to within a minute of the modern value.

He was murdered in 1449 on his own son's orders, the clergy pulled the observatory down, and its location was forgotten until a Russian archaeologist named Vyatkin followed a clue in a seventeenth century deed and dug out the buried arc in 1908. That trench is what you go to see, along with a good small museum on the astronomy. It is not spectacular. It is the single most interesting hour in Samarkand.

Then it is fifteen minutes back down to the station or the airport. The afternoon Afrosiyob has you in Tashkent for dinner, or in Bukhara in under two hours if you are going west instead.