Ten days in Uzbekistan: the greatest buildings in Central Asia, and room to look at them

Land, drop the bag, and spend the first evening on the easiest square in the city. Amir Temur Square is the middle of Soviet-planned Tashkent, a ring of plane trees around an equestrian statue of Timur that replaced, in order, a statue of a Russian general, one of Stalin and one of Marx. The building history of this one patch of grass is most of Uzbek history in miniature.

The museum on its north side was put up in 1996 for the six hundredth anniversary of Timur's reign, under a ribbed turquoise dome that looks like a Timurid mausoleum built by somebody with a much bigger budget. Inside are manuscripts, armour, a copy of the letter Timur sent to Charles VI of France, and a great deal of national pride. It takes an hour and it is the best preparation for Samarkand you will get.

Then walk. The boulevards around the square are lit, busy and full of ice cream sellers until late, and the walk back is the gentlest possible introduction to a city that runs on a scale nothing else in the country does.

Everything worth a day in Tashkent is in the old western quarter, so go there once and stay. Start at Chorsu, under the enormous ribbed blue dome that has become the city's second-best-known building. This is a working market, not a souvenir hall: the dome covers the meat and dairy floors, the spice pyramids and the dried fruit are on the terraces around it, and the bread sellers stack round non loaves like dinner plates in towers. Buy one. Buy the melon too if it is September.

Fifty metres away is the Kukeldash madrasah, built in the 1570s by a vizier whose title meant the khan's foster brother. It has been a caravanserai and, at its worst, a place where women accused of infidelity were thrown from the walls. It is a plain, honest yellow-brick courtyard building and a useful corrective after all the tile.

In the afternoon take a taxi north to the Hazrati Imam complex, which is Tashkent's religious centre and looks it: a square of mosque, madrasa and mausoleum in matching pale brick, mostly reconstructed in 2007. The library here holds the Kufic Quran that Uzbekistan presents as the copy Caliph Uthman was reading when he was murdered in 656. Scholars date the manuscript rather later than that, but it is genuinely one of the oldest Qurans anywhere, and the room it sits in is silent.

The morning train is the best two hours of transport in the country. The Afrosiyob is a Spanish-built high-speed set that runs south-west across irrigated cotton country at up to 230 km/h, tea comes round, and you are in Samarkand before lunch.

Check in, eat, and then keep the afternoon for one thing only. The Registan was the city's public square, the place where royal proclamations were read and executions carried out, and three madrasas were built around it over two and a half centuries: Ulugh Beg's on the west from 1417, then Sher-Dor opposite it in the 1630s with two improbable tigers chasing deer across its portal, and Tilya-Kori filling the north side after that, its prayer hall lined floor to dome in gold leaf.

Go late. The light gets better after five, the tour groups have gone by six, and the square is floodlit after dark, at which point the three portals stop being architecture and start being scenery. Anyone offering to take you up a minaret after hours is soliciting a bribe; it happens constantly and it is not officially permitted.

Start at the tomb. Gur-e-Emir was built for Timur's grandson and ended up holding Timur himself, who died on campaign in the winter of 1405 while marching on China and was brought back here. Under the fluted turquoise dome is a chamber of alabaster, jasper and gold, and in the middle a slab of dark green nephrite over the grave. Soviet archaeologists opened it in June 1941 and confirmed a tall man, lame in the right leg and arm, exactly as the chronicles said.

Walk north through the modern centre to Bibi-Khanym, which Timur ordered built with the plunder of his Indian campaign and which was too ambitious to survive. Bricks were falling out of the arch within a few years of completion, and it stood as a spectacular ruin for centuries until the restorers got to it. The scale is the point: the entrance portal is over thirty metres high and there is a marble Quran stand in the courtyard the size of a small car.

Behind it lies the Siyob bazaar, which is where to eat, and above that the lane of Shah-i-Zinda. This is the best thing in Samarkand and the least photographed from outside, because it is not a monument but a street of tombs climbing a hillside, most of them built for Timurid princesses and generals in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The tilework gets denser and stranger the further up you go. Take an hour longer than you think you need.

Timur's grandson Ulugh Beg was a poor ruler and an extraordinary astronomer. In the 1420s he built an observatory on a hill north-east of the city with a quadrant so large that most of it had to be sunk into the bedrock, and with it he and his colleagues catalogued more than a thousand stars and measured the length of the year to within about a minute of the modern figure. He was beheaded in 1449 on his own son's orders, the observatory was pulled down, and the surviving arc of the instrument lay buried until a Russian archaeologist dug it out in 1908. What you see is that trench, still marked in stone, which is more moving than it sounds.

Downhill from it is Afrosiyab, the site of the city Genghis Khan destroyed in 1220. There is almost nothing standing: it is a bare, dusty plateau of eroded mud walls and holes, and it is the oldest thing in Samarkand by a thousand years. The small museum on the site holds the reason to come, a wall of seventh century Sogdian painting showing ambassadors, camels and a princess crossing a river, found here in 1965 and unlike anything else that survives from pre-Islamic Central Asia.

Finish at the Tomb of the Prophet Daniel on the edge of the same hill, where a long low building covers an eighteen metre grave. The story goes that Timur brought the relics back from Persia and that the body has kept growing ever since, which is why the sarcophagus had to be extended. Nobody serious believes it. Everybody goes.

The Bukhara train takes under two hours and drops you at Kogon, fifteen kilometres out, so allow half an hour more than the timetable suggests. The old town when you get there is a shock of scale after Samarkand: everything is low, sand-coloured and close together, and you can cross it in twenty minutes.

Begin where the town does, at Lyab-i Hauz. The pool was dug in 1620 and is one of the last of the dozens that once supplied Bukhara with water and with a reliable supply of waterborne disease, which the Soviets solved by filling nearly all of them in. Mulberry trees as old as the pool lean over it, chess gets played under them, and the madrasas on two sides make it the obvious place to sit.

Then work west through the trading domes. Three survive of the covered crossroads that housed the specialist bazaars, and this one sold hats: Toqi Telpak Furushon still sells them, along with a great many carpets and rather too much painted woodwork. Just beyond it, sunk four or five metres below the modern street because the town has been rising on its own rubble for a millennium, is Magok-i-Attari, the oldest mosque building left in Central Asia, with a carved brick facade of the twelfth century over foundations that go back much further.

The minaret is the thing you will remember. Kalyan was finished in 1127, stands about 46 metres, and is built of plain baked brick laid in fourteen bands of different geometric patterns, with no tile on it at all until the very top. Genghis Khan reportedly spared it when he levelled everything around it. For centuries criminals were thrown from the gallery, which is why nineteenth century travellers called it the Tower of Death. Around its foot is the ensemble: the great courtyard mosque on one side, rebuilt in the sixteenth century and big enough for twelve thousand people, and the Mir-i-Arab madrasa facing it, which kept teaching through the Soviet period when almost nothing else did.

West of that is the Ark, the mud-brick citadel the emirs ruled from, raised on its own artificial mound. It looks impregnable and was not: the Red Army shelled and bombed it in 1920 and most of the interior is now open ground with a few restored halls around the entrance ramp. The throne room, the mint and the coronation court survive, and so does the story of the two British officers held in the vermin pit here in the 1840s and executed in the square outside.

Then walk into the park behind it for the Ismail Samani mausoleum, which is the oldest and the best building in Bukhara and does not look like much from a distance. It is a ten metre brick cube with a dome on it, put up around the turn of the tenth century for the founder of the Samanid dynasty, and every surface is basketwork brick laid in patterns that change with the angle of the sun. It survived the Mongols because by then it was buried in silt and nobody knew it was there.

This is the long one. The train west runs about six hours through the Kyzylkum, the red sand desert that fills the middle of the country, and there is very little out of the window except sand, telegraph poles and the occasional herd of camels. Bring water, bring lunch, and enjoy it: the carriage is the sociable part of Uzbek travel and somebody will offer you food within the hour.

The line only reached Khiva itself in 2018. Before that everyone got off at Urgench and drove the last 35 km, and plenty still do. Arriving at the town station puts you a few minutes' walk from the west gate of the walls, which is the correct way to enter.

Do nothing much on arrival. Walk in through the Ota Darvoza gate, and the first thing inside is Kalta Minor, a fat unfinished tower of glazed blue and green tile begun in 1851 by a khan who wanted a minaret tall enough to see Bukhara from. He died four years later and it stopped at about 29 metres, which is why it looks like a giant tiled cotton reel. Then find dinner and walk the lanes in the dark.

Everything today is within four hundred metres. Start at the Kuhna Ark, the old citadel against the western wall, which was the khans' residence and government from the twelfth century until they built themselves something better. What is worth the ticket is the summer mosque, a small open court with two walls of blue and white tile that is arguably finer than anything else in town, and the watchtower above it, which is where to be at eight in the morning with the whole walled town below you and the mist still on it.

Then Tosh-Hovli, the stone house, built in the 1830s for Allakuli Khan by architects who were reportedly executed when they said it could not be done in two years. It is nine courtyards and more than 150 rooms, and the harem court is the one to stand in: carved wooden columns on stone bases, and every wall panelled in blue and white majolica to head height, no two panels the same.

Finish at the mausoleum of Pahlavan Mahmud, who was a furrier, a poet and an undefeated wrestler, died in the early fourteenth century and became the patron saint of Khiva. The tomb complex was rebuilt in the early nineteenth century and it is the one building here that is unmistakably a living shrine rather than a museum: turquoise dome, a courtyard of pilgrims, and an interior of white and blue tile that is worth sitting down in.

Keep one thing for the last morning and make it the Juma Mosque, because it is unlike everything else you have seen for nine days. There is no dome, no portal and no tile. It is a flat-roofed hall in the middle of the walled town supported on more than two hundred carved wooden columns in rows, lit only by two openings in the ceiling, and a few of the columns were reused from earlier buildings a thousand years ago. The effect is a dim forest, cool in any weather, and it empties the head.

Then go. Urgench airport is 35 km away, half an hour by taxi, with flights to Tashkent several times a day and a couple a week further afield. If you would rather finish the way you started, the train back to Tashkent runs overnight and gets in for breakfast, which saves a hotel night and gives you the desert again in the dark.