Dynastic History | Kalyan Minaret — The Tower a Qarakhanid Court Paid For

An earlier tower on this ground fell down. What replaced it, in 1127, is the brick minaret that still fixes the skyline of Bukhara's old city, and it was paid for by Muhammad Arslan Khan, the Qarakhanid ruler of the city between 1102 and 1129, who also commissioned a mosque beside it and a tomb for himself.

The tower stands about 46 metres, roughly nine metres across at the base and six at the top, tapering the whole way. The brick is belted in bands of changing pattern, so that the structural material and the ornament are the same thing. A spiral stair climbs inside to the rotunda from which the call to prayer was given. Archnet's record has the first minaret as timber. The accounts name the ruler who paid and, in some tellings, a master called Bako; they name nobody who fired or carried the brick.

Almost everything around it is later and belongs to other dynasties. The congregational mosque was built in stages across the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the Mir-i Arab madrasa facing it went up in 1535–36 under the Shaybanids. The minaret outlasted the mosque it was raised for.

Two stories cling to it. One is that Genghis Khan, taking the city in 1220, ordered this tower spared; it turns up in later retellings rather than in any account written at the time. The other, repeated by European visitors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — Fitzroy Maclean, who came in 1938, is the usual citation — is that condemned prisoners were thrown from the gallery. Neither is carried here as fact on the strength of the telling alone.

The minaret sits inside the historic centre UNESCO inscribed in 1993, and the square at its foot is public ground.

📸 Cover: The minaret from the south, Ymblanter, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons